Reading © 2017 Kaweah
Category Archives: Robinson Jeffers
The Dawn-Breakers of the Alamo
Remember the Alamo?
While recently looking for images for a video project featuring the poem “Dawn” by California poet Robinson Jeffers, I came upon the painting “Dawn at the Alamo,” a rather imaginative and partisan depiction of the fall of the Alamo.
For those readers who aren’t familiar with the story, a band of Anglo-American Texans, apparently disregarding the urgings of their general Sam Houston, holed up in a Spanish mission after taking a Mexican town. They were doomed from the start. Major General Houston had no interest in holding the town, regarding it a strategic liability. The defense of the town did little or nothing for the cause of Texan independence, rather more likely harmed it—at least tactically, yet the defenders of the Alamo are remembered as martyrs of the cause, probably because they had to be remembered as such. They fought bravely, probably knowing that General Santa Anna, a bloodthirsty tyrant by all accounts, had no intention of sparing the lives of any of them. Continue reading
Shine, Perishing Republic
“There is the trap that catches noblest spirits,…”
Perhaps the earliest example of Jeffers’ doctrine of “Inhumanism.” It has the immediate sound of a political sermon, but quickly turns deeply apolitical.
Reading © 2017 Kaweah
Gray Weather
The subjective influence of a gray day utterly changes the reality of the mind. Jeffers describes this not by describing the experience as subjective, but by describing the influence of the weather as objective fact.
@ 1935 Robinson Jeffers
Jeffers Literary Properties
Stanford University Press
Reading © 2017 Kaweah
Image: Honeyhouse Films
Distant Rainfall
Funeral procession over the sea: “the lost battle’s beauty.”
@ 1935 Robinson Jeffers
Jeffers Literary Properties
Stanford University Press
Reading © 2017 Kaweah
Desire as Will
The fire that consumes Tamar’s world is more than a sacrificial fire offered up to “magic horror away.” It is a fire of primal yearning. When Tamar says, “I have my desire,” that narcissistic lust is what aches to set her family’s house ablaze, and correspondingly, in Apology for Bad Dreams, it is a fire—represented by the flammability of the California coast—that ignites Jeffers’ world over and over again. The poem returns to the notion of return, and then it returns again (SP 143–4):
… Beautiful country burn again, …
Burn as before with bitter wonders, …
… I know of no reason / For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.
… the ever-returning roses of dawn.
Neurasthenia and the Calvinist Gloom
Dr. Brad Campbell (Cal Poly SLO) may be accountable for the most curiosity-inducing chapter of the Wild that Attracts Us (ed. ShaunAnne Tangney, 2015). Campbell has studied the “American” phenomenon of neurasthenia, a mental disorder that was frequently diagnosed in the late 19th Century and much of the 20th Century. Neurasthenia ceased to be listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM in 1980. Dr. Campbell presents a strong argument that Robinson Jeffers suffered from symptoms associated with neurasthenia. Though I generally resist the temptation to tag artists with mental disorders (and sexual preoccupations), I can certainly see what Campbell is getting at. Dr. Campbell appears to be something of an authority on neurasthenia as a cultural phenomenon. This may make him overly inclined to diagnose it, but then he knows better than most who might qualify.
Jeffers in an Existential Nutshell
One of Jeffers’ most characteristic passages occurs in his narrative “Mara” (CP 3:45):
… He smelled the wet delight of the dawn-wind
Dropping down the deep canyon to the dark sea, and saw the
pearl-tender rose-flood
Lining high distant ridges, while still deep night
Slept in the canyon-trough, a thousand feet down
Under the shoulder of his horse; he felt a fountain of hysterical sadness
Flow up behind his breast-bone through the net of nerves:
“This is so beautiful:
We are so damned. …”
This passage is more existential than explicitly philosophical, but it carries the tone of tragic beauty that characterizes Jeffers’ most powerful work.
RJA Conference 2017
RJA Conference 2017 is only two months away! This time the annual conference will be taking place at Robinson Jeffers’ alma mater, Occidental College, in Los Angeles, California. Mark your calendars: Friday, February 24 to Sunday, February 26.
Robinson Jeffers spent nearly a decade in Los Angeles, living most of his collegiate years there. He also met his highly influential wife-to-be there. Entries in the Carmel Pine Cone show that for a couple years after Robin and Una Jeffers moved to Carmel, they were still regarded residents of Pasadena. They spent the summer of 1915 in Pasadena and their twin boys were born in Pasadena in late 1916. The Jeffers did not settle in Carmel until 1917.
There is a sense in which Jeffers was a Southern California poet, though he wrote little of value there. It might be said that his poetry was in one aspect a rejection of his Angeleno years, but even as such might have been impossible without his Angeleno years.
The Satanic Verses
As Robinson Jeffers prepared the content for The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948), he went a step further than he had in Be Angry At the Sun and Other Poems in forsaking the poetics of beauty and eternity for the politics of the present, even stooping to vulgar name-calling at times. Such petty preoccupation with human affairs was contrary to Jeffers’ mission and spirit, just as Muhammad’s alleged “satanic verses” violated the monotheistic spirit of his ministry.
Jeffers had excused this loss of focus in Be Angry At the Sun, by citing a mandate for the poet to speak his mind:
… it is right that a man’s views be expressed, though the poetry suffer for it. [1]