Reality and Nature in Robinson Jeffers
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones May 2017 Reality and Nature in Robinson Jeffers Joshua D. Bartee University of Nevada, Las Vegas Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/thesesdissertations Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Repository Citation Bartee, Joshua D., "Reality and Nature in Robinson Jeffers" (2017). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 2940. http://dx.doi.org/10.34917/10985753 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by Digital Scholarship@UNLV with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones by an authorized administrator of Digital Scholarship@UNLV. For more information, please contact [email protected]. REALITY AND NATURE IN ROBINSON JEFFERS By Joshua D. Bartee Bachelor of Arts – Anthropology The University of Oklahoma 2006 Master of Arts – English Literature Humboldt State University 2011 A doctoral project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy – English Department of English College of Liberal Arts The Graduate College University of Nevada, Las Vegas May 2017 Copyright 2017 Joshua Bartee All Rights Reserved Dissertation Approval The Graduate College The University of Nevada, Las Vegas April 6, 2017 This dissertation prepared by Joshua D. Bartee entitled Reality and Nature in Robinson Jeffers is approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy – English Department of English Donald Revell, Ph.D. Kathryn Hausbeck Korgan, Ph.D. Examination Committee Chair Graduate College Interim Dean Claudia Keelan, M.F.A. Examination Committee Member Emily Setina, Ph.D. Examination Committee Member Michael Pravica, Ph.D. Graduate College Faculty Representative ii Abstract Synonyms are the key to understanding Robinson Jeffers’s poetry and his philosophy of inhumanism. Reality, nature, and God are words Jeffers uses to communicate monistic feelings. These words are difficult to define on their own. When used interchangeably by the poet, a sense of oneness with the universe is generated in the reader. This is how Jeffers gives value to the natural world, and his environmental ethic is inextricably tangled up with the numinous as much as the real. A belief in immanence, or that God is present in the material world, guides Jeffers’s philosophy of inhumanism. Reality becomes the ultimate, obvious, and undeniable proof not only of God, but the sanctity of nature. His poetry, when read alongside the Meditations of Roman Stoic philosopher and emperor Marcus Aurelius, takes on an even richer Classical tone in thought and ethos. His first three narrative poems—Tamar, Roan Stallion and The Tower Beyond Tragedy—reveal a poet who is considering that most of the big words in English—nature, reality, God, beauty, truth—might mean the same thing. It is this reductionism of language, both mythopoetic and naturalistic, that makes his work the strange chimera of religio-scientific poetics that it is. The poetry is ecological, but it is also cosmological, and with this equation Jeffers created some of the most profoundly wild and spiritual language of the Modernist era. iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank professors Donald Revell, Claudia Keelan, Emily Setina, Michael Pravica, and Richard Harp, for their advice and guidance. Dedication Dedicated to my parents, David and Brenda Bartee. i Table of Contents Abstract iii Acknowledgments iv Dedication v Chapter One 1 Ecological Vision Chapter Two 29 Reality, Nature, and God Chapter Three 73 Inhumanism and the Meditations Chapter Four 105 Tamar: A Close Reading Chapter Five 122 Roan Stallion Chapter Six 139 The Tower Beyond Tragedy Chapter Seven 176 Conclusion Works Cited 191 Curriculum Vitae 201 vi Chapter One Ecological Vision __________________ In 20th century American literature, the source and foundation for the ecopoetic tradition can be located in the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Yet to study him as an ecopoet is to study him in contemporary terms. Christ was not necessarily a Christian, as those who were inspired by him were to be called afterwards, but the originator of Christianity. Jeffers was the originator and only champion, apart from one noted disciple (William Everson) and some devout readers, of a philosophy he called “inhumanism,” or the worship of the not-man. It is, among many things, a critique of religion as narcissistic. It is an approach to the problem of meaning as mostly symbolic, made tragic by our insistence on looking beyond the actual for the most remotely possible. Inhumanism rejects the idea of the savior as an artifact of older, anthropocentric attitudes about man’s place in the cosmos, as explored in “Point Pinos and Point Lobos” (CP 1:92) and “Meditation on Saviors” (CP 1:396). Jeffers was not an ecopoet, as seminal and as sacred his poetry turned out to be to the construction of a modern natural aesthetic—an ecological aesthetic— in American letters. George Sterling, in Robinson Jeffers: The Man and the Artist, places Jeffers inside the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the other Transcendentalists. Sterling considers Jeffers a new American tragedian in the legacy of the Ancient Greeks. Consider this, by Sterling: Such derivative touches as may appear in the work of Robinson Jeffers are from the phantom styluses of the great Greek tragedians, Aeschylus and Sophocles. No other influences greatly intervene, unless they be a breath from the winter woods of Emerson, and occasional gleams from the iris-ink of Keats. It will perhaps become the fashion, what 1 of the long sweep and surge of his lines, the reach of his imagination, to claim that he stems from Whitman. Such would be the most obvious criterion. But their dissimilarities are too great to imply any close relationship. (3-4) Jeffers expressed the most unique ecological vision in Modernist poetry. He was an inhumanist, a philosophy grounded in ecocentrism, one where interdependence and continuity are considered not only natural facts but the very definition of contigent, as opposed to the cultural constructions of individualism and teleology. His poetry arraigned nature to be in the ascendancy for a future that would struggle with a postindustrial landscape. Jeffers’s poetry resonates at a time when society is grossly over-interested in its own reflection in the curated mirrors of virtual identity. His work provides a foundation for a critique of anthropocentric attitudes in the world and in the humanities. And that world, in Jeffers, becomes a stage for startling tragic poetry. The landscape is more than simply a witness to human presence or victim of its desires, even as humans alter the landscape—but those pigmy transmogrifications have little lasting impact on a world in flux. Landscape lives a long time and changes as a matter of course. Jeffers enshrines the beauty of places, places that are real for a geological moment. His ecological vision makes clear an intimate and outward consideration of deep time, as good as any Modernist at revealing the implications of science and technology on the human understanding of time. He considers place sacrosanct; we are observers in an ancient universe changing at breakneck speed. And nowhere in his poetry is place more important than the long narratives. Inhumanism is a philosophy that does not reject humanism but extrapolates its values to include all things, human and nonhuman. The philosophy rejects the aggrandizement of the human figure, in reality and in literature. Inhumanism is really All-Otherism. Humanism is All-But- Otherism, even in its accounting and cataloguing of the natural world. Jeffers defines the term in 2 the original 1947 preface to The Double Axe and Other Poems. He states that this “new attitude” of his, Is based on a recognition of the astonishing beauty of things and their living wholeness, and on a rational acceptance of the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe… An infant feels himself to be central and of primary importance; an adult knows better; it seems time that the human race attained to an adult habit of thought in this regard. The attitude is neither misanthropic nor pessimist nor irreligious, though two or three people have said so, and may again; but it involves a certain detachment. (CP 4:418). It is a postromantic philosophy, one in which man is not simply imagined in nature, but placed there, in reality, as a part of it. The atheism of Percy Bysshe Shelley was a furtherance of humanism, and led to the sanctification of poetry and poetic personality. Inhumanism rejects the individual personality as well as the sacredness of poetry. Jeffers once remarked in a lyric that “The pallid / pursuit of the world’s beauty on paper, / Unless a tall angel comes to require it, is a pitiful pastime” (“Second-Best,” CP 2:132). It is a philosophy that conflates beauty with nature, and requires a certain fatalistic, but mature, sensibility to consider. It is about “the beauty of things and their living wholeness”—in other words, it is about the ecology of the universe. The skein-like quality of ecopoetry, its characteristic mark of naming and listing according to Linaean or folk taxonomy, does not entirely mesh with the philosophy of inhumanism, which asserts that everything human (from language to our physical presence) disfigures nature, as in the lyric “The Place for No Story”: “This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen.