Making It New: 1900–1945 355and wonder. Robinson Jeffers was born in Pittsburgh and studied in Europe. After he
married, however, he went to live on the sparsely populated coast of California, where
he built a granite house and tower on cliffs facing the sea. Jeffers found his poetic
voice with Tamar and Other Poems (1924). Reaction to the volume, published
privately, was enthusiastic, and a commercial edition with new poems added, Roan
Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems, was published in 1925. Many other volumes
followed, among them The Women at Point Sur (1927), Give Your Heart to the Hawks
and Other Poems (1933), and Hungerfield, and Other Poems (1954). Together, they
established Jeffers as the supreme poet of the Far West of his time: a man whose work
both imitates and celebrates the vast, elemental tendencies of the Western landscape
and the sea beyond. Jeffers declared that his aim was to “uncenter the human mind
from itself.” He wanted his verse to break away from all the versions of experience
which emphasized its exclusively human properties, and to rediscover our relationship
with the foundations of nature. Man, Jeffers insisted, must acknowledge the superior
value of the instinctive life, of natural action, and self-expression. He must try to
imitate the rocks in their coldness and endurance, the hawks in their isolation, and all
physical nature in its surrender to the wild, primeval level of being. This necessarily
meant a repudiation of all humanistic philosophies in favor of what the poet liked to
call “Inhumanism.” It meant, he admitted, “a shifting of emphasis and significance
from man to notman” with a consequent loss of those values which, for centuries, we
have learned to cherish – among them, reason and self-restraint, urbanity and
decorum. But, Jeffers hastened to add, it also meant the discovery of an older liberty,
aligning us with the people of ancient cultures; and it involved, too, an escape from
the involuted self-consciousness that makes our modern world such a painful one.
A poem like “Divinely Superfluous Beauty” illustrates the means by which Jeffers
tried to express his philosophy of Inhumanism. It opens with a vision of the
spontaneous energy running through all things, “The storm-dances of gulls, the
barking game of seals,” and then concludes with the wish to be identified with this
energy, to become one with all that is “divinely superfluous.” “The incredible beauty
of joy / Stars with fire the joining of lips,” declares the poet, “O let our loves too / Be
joined.” As in all of Jeffers’s shorter poems, the impact of these lines depends upon
perspective: human life is seen from an immense distance, placed within the larger
dimensions of earth, sea, and sky. The poet–philosopher who speaks here helps to
place the subject as well, for his voice, primitive and oracular, seems to align him
with the older freedoms he is celebrating. This is largely the result of the style Jeffers
developed, in which the tones of colloquial speech are recreated without weakening
formal control of the line. Of great flexibility, hovering somewhere between free
verse and iambic pentameter, the rhythms are precise and emphatic without being
regular. Together with the unelaborate syntax, and comparatively simple diction,
they help to give poems like this a feeling of rugged exactitude: to communicate
what Jeffers himself termed “power and reality ..., substance and sense.”
If Jeffers was unlike Robinson or Frost in terms of his fundamental vision and
voice – categorical where they were uncertain, rapt and bardic while they played in a
quieter, more enigmatic key – he was nevertheless like them in his obsession with theGGray_c04.indd 355ray_c 04 .indd 355 8 8/1/2011 7:53:50 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 50 AM