Robinson Jeffers ~ Poet of Darwin and Nietzsche

Robinson Jeffers is one of our most critical poets of the 20th century, for he expressed (often) an anti-modern philosophy (as opposed to a subjective and humanistic philosophy). As his bio indicates, Jeffers had a rich education, grounded in both in theology and literature, philosophy and science. A few of his great modern influences in science and philosophy were Darwin and Nietzsche. These influences shaped a poetry and philosophy of "inhumanism" so that Jeffers could write in his poem "Love of the Wild Swan":

I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One colour, or the glinting flash, or the splendour of things.

He lived on the rocky coast of northern California. A good place for Jeffers, since he believed it was the job of the poet to "reclaim substance and sense, and psychological reality," meaning the natural reality of life, a reality that cares little for humanity. Jeffers believed that the "permanent aspects of life" are those that science observes--NATURE. So as far as human civilization was concerned, Jeffers was pretty grim, as in this excerpt from "Summer Holiday":

When the sun shouts and people abound
One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze
And the iron age; iron the unstable metal;
Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities
Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.
Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them,
Then nothing will remain of the iron age
And all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem
Stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass
In the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain...

Jeffers used the understanding science and human history to come to the conclusion that we are not long for this world. This view of human civilization rubs hard against the humanistic idea that we as humans are critical to the future of life. One might ask why Jeffers wrote poetry at all then. Are there are good reasons why Jeffers would be so anti-human?

Despite this "inhumanism," some scholars believe Jeffers best represents us today. In "Robinson Jeffers: Poet for the New Century," Robert Brophy, a Jeffers scholar, says that Robinson Jeffers was neglected in the 20th century but will not be in the 21st:

Much of what he is being valued for now is what in his lifetime caused neglect and dismissal. As the century turns, he offers his cosmic vision to a world that, aided by NASA space probes and the Hubble and Keck telescopes, is finally awakening to the universe and has begun, in his phrase, to "turn outward." His "inhumanism" is no longer a synonym for misanthropy but a newfound and wonderfully apt word. Through it the ecologist goes beyond a progressive but still selfish sense of mere stewardship toward an awed realization that mankind is only one species among myriad others which have purposes of their own, not human-related, and are part, as Jeffers would say, "one organism." To a world where wilderness is fast being clear-cut, invaded by off-the-road vehicles, and is more stringently asphalt-ringed, his awe for total Otherness, as in his lyric"The Place for No Story," finds healing resonance. His incessant warnings of a population overwhelming the biosphere is no longer rantings. And his verse, stark, uncompromising, terse, incisive is eminently accessible and memorable. Jeffers seems, as it were, born out of his time. He may prove to be the prophet/seer/pathfinder for the twenty-first century.