What Robinson Jeffers Found At The Edge Of Western Civilization

It is not surprising to find that Jeffers prefers nature to the works of men. The human spectacle is to him simply another manifestation of the universal rhythm. Humanity is not, as a good deal of 19th century philosophy would have it, marching triumphantly to Utopia along a path unbroken from earliest origins. Like the seas, races are tidal phenomena having their rise and ebb. Such a vision of the cyclic nature of human works might make it a difficult world for practical people, but to Jeffers it is the inevitable child of the accumulated knowledge of the age; and he is neither glad nor sorry to observe that

...the nations labor and gather and dissolve
Into destruction; the stars sharpen
Their spirit of splendor, and then it dims, and the stars Darken; and that the spirit of man
Sharpens up to maturity and cools dull
With age, dies, and rusts out of service;
And all these tidal gatherings, growth and decay, Shining and darkening, are forever
Renewed...

Practical People

I have spoken of the significance which Jeffers gives to the Pacific coast as the last frontier of the westward migrations. His imagination has been tremendously stimulated by the thought of what is to come now that the race is nearly home to mother Asia: from this concept he writes poems in two distinct moods. One from wonder as to where man is to go—perhaps back to Asia, perhaps to Alaska, or perhaps by means of the airplane, to colonize the other planets—produces Invocation, Dream of the Future, Ode on Human Destinies, The Torch-Bearers’ Race, Not Our Good Luck, The Cycle. In the other mood he looks back to Europe and sees there one vast graveyard in which the dead lie many races deep, or over the expanse of his own continent whereon the race is damming up against the Pacific barrier, despoiling the countryside and flowing into thick urban pools: thence the poems Contrast, A Redeemer, The Broken Balance.

It is from this second, and more mature, mood that is engendered his thesis that the nations are dissolving in a period of decadence. According to Jeffers (and Spengler) a civilization perishes when the relationship that exists between men and the earth during agricultural periods is replaced by a thickening of the people in great cities. He sees that until the frontier was pushed to the Pacific there was expansion and an active dealing with the wilderness which tempered man and kept him relatively clean and replenished. But now even the new world has relinquished power to the cities, which have become enormous leeches sucking the life-blood from the land. The struggle with nature is ended, and man from vicious metropolitan centers drains the earth for his profit.

***

Jeffers has little else to say of America’s destiny. Though he is unusually aware of his country, his is no genius for social or political poetry. Recalling some of the remarks in Chapter V on the lyrics, it is evident that he concurs with the thought of some political philosophers who look for a monarchy or dictatorship to replace eventually the present form of government:

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...

Shine Perishing Republic

Then again, in answering a questionnaire presented by a liberal magazine to twelve American writers, Jeffers gives an opinion of the machine age and the revolutionary labor movements. Here are some of the questions with his answers:

Q. Do you regard our contemporary American culture as decadent? If so, what do you think will succeed it?

A. Not yet. What will follow? Centuries of increasing decadence.

Q. Does the advent of the machine mean the death of art and culture, or does it mean the birth of a new culture?

A. “The advent of the machine” changes art and culture, but less than people imagine, and will neither kill nor initiate.

Q. How should the artist adapt himself to the machine age?

A. The machine age is only a partial change; the artist should adapt himself to it without ignorance but without excitement. It provides at the most some shift of scenery for the old actors.

Q. What attitude should the artist take to the revolutionary labor movement? Is there any hope of a new world culture through the rise of the workers to power? If so what will that culture be?

A. “The rise of the workers to power,” if it should reach secure establishment, would produce a quietist, archaizing, lyrical, extremely formal sort of culture. During the time of struggle and disappointment, any revolutionary labor movement will react on creative work, as a source of power, and a source of disturbance; will break molds, intensify and prevent ideas, force discoveries. But a really new culture could arise only beyond the Lethe of a new dark ages.

***

Before closing this chapter on Jeffersian values, which are unsocial and unorthodox, I shall ask what values he offers to replace those which he discards. If this poet is distinguished by a cold, scientific, individualistic, sometimes contemptuous, regard for massed humanity, I believe he is at the same time, one of the great lovers of his fellow men; and is a man whose life and works reveal him to be rich in sympathy, tolerance, love, and an idealism which, wounded by the steep of the world, seeks to hide itself under a cloak of tragic terror, contempt and satirical scorn.

He believes that there is nothing to be done about the great rhythm of the world which is bearing our civilization through decadence to oblivion; the great tidal movements are beyond human control, and therefore he writes: “Some of you think you can save society. I think it is impossible, and that you (radicals, social uplifters, etc.) only hasten the process of decadence. Of course as a matter of right and justice, I sympathize with radicalism; and in any case I don’t oppose it; from an abstract point of view there is no reason that I know of for propping and prolonging the period of decadence. Perhaps the more rapid it is, the more rapid comes the new start.”

Jeffers’ message, if he may be said to have one, is for men to turn from preoccupation with themselves to the external world, embrace its beauty and erect a new God from the reasonable picture of the universe shown by science. Thus, one of the intentions of Point Sur is spoken of as follows:

An attempt to uncenter the human mind from itself. There is no health for the individual whose attention is taken up with his own mind and processes; equally there is no health for the society that is always introverted on its own members, as ours becomes more and more, the interest engaged inward in love and hatred, companionship and competition. These are necessary of course, but as they absorb all the interest they become fatal. All past cultures have died of introversion at last, and so will this one, but the individual can be free of the net, in his mind. It is a matter of “transvaluing values,” to use the phrase of somebody that local people accuse me quite falsely of deriving from.

Thus, the drift of Jeffers’ scheme of values is determined first, through faith in an inhuman universe, in the unconscious matrix of which, man, via death, realizes relative peace in freedom from painful consciousness; second, through his unsocial nature which holds that man (though “someways one of the nobler animals”) has not, like the hawks, the value of rareness, and that America especially is made with group activity. He calls for men to embrace the external world:

...But living if you will
It is possible for you to break prison of yourselves and enter the nature of things and use the beauty.
Wine and lawlessness, art and music, love, self-torture, religion, Are means but are not needful, contemplation will do it. Only to break human collectedness.

The Humanist's Tragedy

Jeffers is no reformer, but an idealist to whom his own words of Thoreau may be applied: a poet who “expresses most significantly the secret austerity under the national expansiveness.” His is a love of blended austerity and tenderness for humanity caught in a web of pain; his is a hatred for cruel and blood-thirsty humanity which tortures itself and its fellow animals. His vision surpasses that of Whitman, for Jeffers soars beyond humanity to the very “dawn-drowned army of stars,” and there on the highest porch of heaven plants the banner of his faith.

What I see is the enormous beauty of things, but what I attempt Is nothing to that. I am helpless toward that.
It is only to form in stone the mold of some ideal humanity that might be worthy to be
Under that lightning. Animalcules that God (if he were given to laughter) might omit to laugh at.

An Artist

Like the hermit sculptor of these lines who sought to hew his faith in the walls of a desert canyon, Jeffers has consecrated his poetry to the idealistic task of taking humanity beyond itself, freed of its pain, into the relatively peaceful heart of a beautiful and universal God.

-excerpted from “Robinson Jeffers: The Man and His Works” by Lawrence Clark Powell (1934)