Month: March 2007

Here are a couple of poems from the early version of Jeffers’ selected poems that were left out by Tim Hunt that seemed to me to be important themes in Jeffers’ work. It would be interesting to examine in more detail what poems Hunt included that Jeffers didn’t and which poems Jeffers included but Hunt left out. My initial impression was that Hunt was trying to take some of the hard edges off Jeffers and make him appear more compassionate than he probably really was.

Of course, my attraction to these poems probably suggests I share some of these beliefs with Jeffers, though I’m sure Jeffers would have found me much too soft and sentimental for his tastes.

Historically, Jeffers is not alone in feeling that American materialism threatens America’s well being:

AVE CAESAR

No bitterness: our ancestors did it.
They were only ignorant and hopeful, they wanted freedom but wealth too.
Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.
Or rather-for we are not aquiline Romans but soft mixed colonists-
Some kindly Sicilian tyrant who’ll keep
Poverty and Carthage off until the Romans arrive.
We are easy to manage, a gregarious people,
Full of sentiment, clever at mechanics, and we love our luxuries.

A hundred years earlier Emerson warned “things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” but even he didn’t go so far as to equate this desire for things with political tyranny. It’s not an invention of the Bush Administration?!

I’ll have to admit that I share some of Jeffers’ disdain for wealth and the softness engendered by that wealth:

THE TRAP

I am not well civilized, really alien here: trust me not.
I can understand the guns and the airplanes,
The other conveniences leave me cold.

“We must adjust our economics to the new abundance .
Of what? Toys: motors, music-boxes,
Paper, fine clothes, leisure, diversion.

I honestly believe (but really an alien here: trust me not)
Blind war, compared to this kind of life,
Has nobility, famine has dignity.

Be happy, adjust your economics to the new abundance;
One is neither saint nor devil, to wish
The intolerable nobler alternative.

Having fought in Vietnam I’m not about to believe war is nobler than owning too many toys, but the point is well taken. Why would anyone be willing to trade the environment for a few more toys? Is there really any doubt that far too many Americans are soft, not to mention overweight? Overall, though, I consider myself more Athenian while Jeffers sounds an awful lot like a Spartan.

I just ordered a new version of The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, this one edited by Tim Hunt. I did it because the Random House copy had started to turn brown and was giving me a sinus headache since I am wildly allergic to book mold. More importantly, much of Jeffers’ poetry that was being cited on the web came from his later poetry, which was not included in the earlier Selected Poetry.

I’ve noted a number of changes in the book in the part I’ve already read, but I can’t imagine why Jeffers would have omitted this poem from his earlier collection:

CREDO

My, friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young blue-gum
And gazing upon it gathering and quieting
The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt, the actual
Appalling presence, the power of the waters.
He believes that nothing is real except as we make it. I humbler have found in my blood
Bred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism.
Multitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is only
The bone vault’s ocean: out there is the ocean’s;

The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of reality. The mind
Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;
The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself, the heart-breaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

As I’ve made clear, I’m quite drawn to Asian literature, particularly the Taoists and Chan Buddhism, but I don’t think I could agree with any poem more than this one.

This is my answer to Wallace Stevens’ “The Jar,” the answer I’ve never been able to articulate as directly and concisely as:

The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself, the heart-breaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.

It is delightful to imagine new realities, brave new worlds, but all are but a poor imitation of the transcending beauty of the world that already lays before us if only we’re able to see it.