Robinson Jeffers, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1937. Larger.
California inspires more than its share of visionaries, but few could ever match the poet Robinson Jeffers for cosmic scope.
Convinced that human beings were only part of the "divinely superfluous beauty" of the natural world, Jeffers created poems that sought to challenge human perspectives. Sometimes, as in this passage from his 1928 narrative poem "Cawdor," Jeffers even asked readers to try to imagine inhuman perspectives, like the one represented in the death dream of an imprisoned wounded eagle.
The shining ocean below lay on the shore
Like the great shield of the moon come down, rolling bright rim to rim with the earth. Against it the multiform
And many-canyoned coast-range hills were gathered into one carven mountain, one modulated
Eagle's cry made stone, stopping the strength of the sea. The beaked and winged effluence
Felt the air foam under its throat and saw
The mountain sun-cup Tassajara, where fawns
Dance in the stream of the hot fountains at dawn,
Smoothed out, and the high strained ridges beyond Cachagua,
Where the rivers are born and the last condor is dead,
Flatten, and a hundred miles toward morning the Sierras
Dawn with their peaks of snow, and dwindle and smooth down
On the globed earth.
In the 1930's, Robinson Jeffers was one of America's most celebrated poets, thanks largely to his uncompromising vision and his verse about the natural wonder that is California's central coast.
Permanent Life
From The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, 1938.
"Hawk Tower, Tor House," photographed by Celeste Davison, 2008. Larger.
To the question whether poets are born or made, California poet Robinson Jeffers adds another possibility, they evolve by accident.
In the foreword to his seleced poems, Robinson Jeffers recounts the accidents that helped create his distintive voice. The first was the influence of his wife; the second was the character of life as lived on the California coast.
A second piece of pure accident brought us to the Monterey coast mountains, where for the first time in my life I could see people living—amid magnificent unspoiled scenery—essentially as they did in the Idyls or the Sagas, or in Homer's Ithaca. Here was life purged of its ephemeral accretions. Men were riding after cattle, or plowing the headland, hovered by white sea-gulls, as they have done for thousands of years, and will for thousands to come. Here was contemporary life that was also permanent life; and not shut from the modern world but conscious of it and related to it; capable of expressing its spirit, but unencumbered by the mass of poetically irrelevant detail and complexities that make a civilization.
By this time I was nearing thirty, and still a whole series of accidents was required to stir my lazy energies to the point of writing verse that seemed to be—whether good or bad—at least my own voice.
The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers was published in 1938.
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