In my last post I focused on three emblematic moderns: Frost, Pound and Eliot. In a prior post I mentioned that Whitman and Dickinson would not begin to influence poets until a generation further on. I was wrong. Whitman appears to have found an exponent of his long line in a contrary American poet, one who, though born in the east, unlike Amy Lowell and Hilda Doolittle and Sara Teasdale did not stay there, and unlike Frost, Pound and, Eliot, moved from east to west: I refer, of course, to Robinson Jeffers, poet laureate of Big Sur, bard of California, who celebrated nature in ways Dickinson would admire.
I bring him up today, on Thanksgiving, for his prophetic poems about America. The son of a Presbyterian preacher and scholar, and born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, he had traveled in Europe, studying in Germany, France and Switzerland, becoming fluent in German and French, before earning a Bachelor’s degree from Occidental College in Los Angeles at age 18.[i] Since he was born on January 10th 1887, that puts him entering the University of Southern California after that B.A. in 1905 or 1906, to study literature, then medicine. He met Una Call Kuster there in 1906, three years older, also a graduate student, wife of a lawyer — and they became lovers. Mr. Kuster discovered their affair in 1910, and Jeffers fled to the U of Washington to study forestry for a while, then returned to Los Angeles; in 1912 the affair reached the front pages of the Los Angeles Times, and shortly thereafter they moved to Lake Washington near Seattle to await her divorce, and were wed in 1913. I leave to your imagination all the sordid details — or you can check out Arthur B. Coffin’s summary at the website Modern American Poetry.[ii]
But it is not for this story that I bring Jeffers to your attention today. I want you to read two poems, published about 10 years apart, in the light of the following description Jeffers made of himself at age 27, married to Una his love, by which time the two were living in Carmel, California. The following description of his attempt to be original at age 27 was written in 1935 for the Modern Library:[iii]
This originality, without which a writer of verses is only a verse-writer, is there any way to attain it? The more advanced contemporary poets were attaining it by going farther and farther along the way that perhaps Mallarmé’s aging dream had shown them, divorcing poetry from reason and ideas, bringing it nearer to music, finally to astonish the world with what would look like pure nonsense and would be pure poetry…. It seemed to me that Mallarmé and his followers, renouncing intelligibility in order to concentrate on the music of poetry, had turned off the road into a narrowing lane. Their successors could only make further renunciations; ideas had gone, now meter had gone, imagery would have to go; then recognizable emotions would have to go; perhaps at last even words might have to go, or give up their meaning, nothing be left but musical syllables…. I did not want to become slight and fantastic, abstract and unintelligible. I was doomed to go on imitating dead men, unless some impossible wind should blow me emotions or ideas, or a point of view, or even mere rhythms, that had not occurred to them [the modernists].
To Valerie, my wife, most modern poetry “look[s] like pure nonsense,” but she doesn’t recognize it as “pure poetry.” She likes poets like Tolkien who “go on imitating dead men.” Jeffers, at about this time, wrote the following poem, “Shine, Perishing Republic,” in which he does not imitate dead men — although he may have been inspired by the dead Whitman. He wrote the second poem, “Shine, Republic” perhaps 10 years later, sometime around the publication of Roan stallion, Tamar and other poems, although it is not included in that volume. For different reasons, both poems scare the living hell out of me. Read them carefully; they demand, and repay, careful reading (and note that Una and Robinson’s only living children were twin boys, born in 1916 — he addresses them here):
Shine, Perishing Republic
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.
You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught – they say – God, when he walked on earth.[iv]
Note here that although Jeffers has used a long line, it is not as erratic as Whitman’s, and is far more rhetorical. “You making haste haste on decay” is not a misprint. The first “haste” is a noun, the second a verb. This text is from The collected poetry of Robinson Jeffers, as edited by Tim Hunt, who has done a massive labor in recovering, as nearly as possible, not only Jeffers’s text but his punctuation as well. (I have followed Hunt’s practice in indenting lines that flow past the edge of the page, wrapping onto the next line.)
The first stanza, with its image of lava cooling, is equal to anything Pound ever wrote, but Jeffers insists on keeping the image firmly in a place, his America, rather than generalizing it. I find the poem a powerful indictment of the country that, sometime after the Civil War, started renouncing its own struggle for democracy and started acquiring an empire.
The next poem seems to me to go in an entirely different direction — well, not entirely. What it does is accept the pessimism of the first poem, and call for a rebirth of the republic “in the next age” — which led Jeffers to oppose America’s involvement in the Second World War.
Shine, Republic
The quality of these trees, green height; of the sky, shining, of water, a clear flow; of the rock, hardness
And reticence: each is noble in its quality. The love of freedom has been the quality of Western man.
There is a stubborn torch that flames from Marathon to Concord, its dangerous beauty binding three ages
Into one time; the waves of barbarism and civilization have eclipsed but have never quenched it.
For the Greeks the love of beauty, for Rome of ruling; for the present age the passionate love of discovery;
But in one noble passion we are one; and Washington, Luther, Tacitus, Aeschylus, one kind of man.
And you, America, that passion made you. You were not born to prosperity, you were born to love freedom.
You did not say ‘en masse,’ you said ‘independence.’ But we cannot have all the luxuries and freedom also.
Freedom is poor and laborious; that torch is not safe but hungry, and often requires blood for its fuel.
You will tame it against it burn too clearly, you will hood it like a kept hawk, you will perch it
*****on the wrist of Caesar.
But keep the tradition, conserve the forms, the observances, keep the spot sore. Be great,
*****carve deep your heel-marks.
The states of the next age will no doubt remember you, and edge their love of freedom
*****with contempt of luxury.[v]
Here Jeffers is more straightforwardly hortatory, losing a little of his ironic edge; but when he first introduces the image of freedom as a torch, then mutates it to a “kept hawk” perched on the wrist of Caesar, all the irony and rage he has so carefully distanced us from comes flooding to the fore, and he urges the Republic to shine as it digs in its heels, to shine as an example of corruption and a warning against too easily yielding personal freedoms — sentiments that could almost as well come out of what Steven Bannon calls the “alt-right”.
Consider these poems an introduction to Jeffers, as were the ones in my last post, introducing Frost, Eliot and Pound. Next time I want to introduce three women whose abilities parallel those gentlemen’s: Hilda Doolittle, Amy Lowell and Sara Teasdale. Then shuttle between these modernists and some of the other traditionalists in the first half of the 20th Century.
H.D., Lowell and Teasdale were ardent modernists, but in each case they broke with the men who led the way, especially with Pound. See you next month.
But hold on, I hear you say: Only two poems to give thanks for?
Your turn.
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[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Jeffers; all other biographical details in this post are from this source, accessed throughout the month of November, 2016.
[ii] http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/jeffers/life.htm, where the biographical sketch is listed as “From American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by the American Council of Learned Societies”, which I assume was Coffin’s original venue.
[iii] Roan stallion, Tamar and other poems / by Robinson Jeffers. — New York : Modern Library, c1935. The quote comes from several pages of his introduction, pp. vii-x.
[iv] The collected poetry of Robinson Jeffers / edited by Tim Hunt. – (v. 1 ; 1920-1928), p. 15.
[v] The collected poetry of Robinson Jeffers / edited by Tim Hunt. – (v. 2 ; 1928-1938), p.417