Arts and Letters

Robinson Jeffers was born in Pittsburgh seventy-five years ago, but his life as we now know it is identified with California, where in 1925 he suddenly became famous as a poet. The suddenness of his fame was one of several accidents to which he was happy to pay tribute. The accident in this case was the devotion of a friend and fellow poet, James Rorty. In 1924 Jeffers had published at his own expense the volume entitled Tamar and Other Poems. It was printed in New York, where nobody reviewed it or read it. Rorty, coming east from California, decided to see if he could change all this. He went to the printer's office, took away several dozen copies of the book, and called upon all the editors he knew, saying: "Read this; it is truly remarkable; there is nothing else like it in the world today." The result was twofold. Several simultaneous and enthusiastic reviews appeared; and early the next year the book was properly published under the new title Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems. The reputation of Jeffers dates from that exciting moment.

But other accidents had preceded this one. At nineteen Jeffers came upon the statement by Nietzsche: "Poets lie too much." A dozen years later, he says, "I decided not to tell lies in verse. Not to feign any emotion that I did not feel; not to pretend to believe in optimism or pessimism, or unreversible progress; not to say anything because it was popular, or generally accepted, or fashionable in intellectual circles, unless I myself believed it; and not to believe easily." Of course there was something in him that made him respond to Nietzsche as he did, and this was the first accident of all. The same thing in him had moved him as he approached his thirtieth year to believe, as he records in the foreword to his Selected Poetry (1938): "that poetry—if it was to survive at all—must reclaim some of the power and reality that it was so hastily surrendering to prose. The modern French poetry of that time, and the most 'modern' of the English poetry, seemed to me thoroughly defeatist, as if poetry were in terror of prose, and desperately trying to save its soul from the victor by giving up its body. It was becoming slight and fantastic, abstract, unreal, eccentric; and was not even saving its soul, for these are generally anti-poetic qualities. It must reclaim substance and sense, and physical and psychological reality. This feeling has been basic in my mind since then. It led me to write narrative poetry, and to draw subjects from contemporary life; to present aspects of life that modern poetry had generally avoided; and to attempt the expression of philosophic and scientific ideas in verse. It was not in my mind to open new fields for poetry, but only to reclaim old freedom."

Even then there had to be further accidents before he could cease to be the commonplace poet he had begun by being; for there is as little resemblance between his first published poems and Tamar as there is between Whitman's newspaper verses and Leaves of Grass—also printed at the author's expense, and much more slowly recognized. The remaining accidents, he has said, were two: his meeting Una, who became his wife—"a woman in a Scotch ballad, passionate, untamed, and rather heroic," and their coming to the Monterey coast mountains, where he built a stone house with his own hands and where with Una's help he achieved the isolation he desired. Tor House soon became a legend, as did the solitude of the genius who lived in it and occasionally was photographed—a man of improbable, grim, abstracted beauty, indeed a hawk, a figure of granite, rather than a man at all. The fact that to those who knew him he was affectionate and humorous, warm-hearted and courtly, is doubtless inconsistent with the legend. But like all legends this one is true at the point where it needs to be; it illustrates the poetry of Jeffers, which after 1925 grew in both bulk and depth, and which never deserted the position it took when its author, after years of studying medicine and forestry, and after several false starts in verse from which his own voice was absent, first attained to his maturity.

This position was uncompromising, and to many it has remained unacceptable, but from it has flowed all his power. Modern man, he is always saying, has fallen in love with himself, and in doing so has lost even the memory of those great things he once knew how to live with: grief, pain, pity, fear, cruelty—in a word, tragedy. The narratives of Jeffers are tragic, and often they are harrowing; nor does any of them permit us to forget the ultimate perspective of the universe in which man still has to find his way, though he has become a creature of luxury and has the illusion that henceforth life will be easy. Jeffers thought he had come into the world to tell us otherwise. The mountain, the hawk, the ocean, the rock, the lightning—all those things are older than we are, and truer; at least they do not deceive themselves. We came after them and we shall go before them, but most of us do not know this. The Nature that is bound to survive us—there, he says in an astonishing variety of ways, is the thing to contemplate, and to contemplate so coldly, in the manner of artists standing before masterpieces, that we shall almost rejoice in the spectacle of our own annihilation. In the short poem "Signpost" he said:

Civilized, crying how to be human again: this will tell you how.
Turn outward, love things, not men, turn right away from humanity,
Let that doll lie. Consider if you like how the lilies grow,
Lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinity
Make your veins cold, look at the silent stars, let your eyes
Climb the great ladder out of the pit of yourself and man.

In the long poem "Roan Stallion" he said it with a fierier eloquence:

Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to
break through, the coal to break into fire,
The atom to be split.
Tragedy that breaks man's face and
a white fire flies out of it; vision that fools him
Out of his limits, desire that fools him out of his limits,
unnatural crime, inhuman science,
Slit eyes in the mask; wild loves that leap over the walls of nature,
the wild fence-vaulter science,
Useless intelligence of far stars, dim knowledge of the spinning
demons that make an atom,
These break, these pierce, these deify, praising their God shrilly
with fierce voices: not in a man's shape
He approves the praise, he that walks lightning-naked on the
Pacific, that laces the suns with planets,
The heart of the atom with electrons: what is humanity in this
cosmos? For him, the last
Least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution; for itself, the
mould to break away from, the coal
To break into fire, the atom to be split.

"God," said Jeffers in still a third poem, "Triad," "is very beautiful, but hardly a friend of humanity." It was his beauty, not his friendship, that he thought we ought to seek. For his beauty is permanent, and "Poetry," as the foreword of 1938 remarked, "is bound to concern itself chiefly with permanent things." If Jeffers was wrong he will be wrong forever, and he would be the first to admit this. Right or wrong, however, his poems have power. And this power, at a guess, will last into other centuries than this one which he thought so pitifully mistaken.