Dix 1 Matthew Dix Dr.

Vander Zee Modern Poetry 23 April 2014 Jeffers in the Canon The critical reputation of Modernist poet Robinson Jeffers is peculiar in that its tumultuous trajectory all but proves the importance of (what should be) arbitrary factors to the career of a poet, including geographic location, hype and fanaticism, personal political opinion and even social detachment. Poet of the American West Coast, Jefferss life is first made to differ from his Modernist contemporaries by the onset of the Great War, which in 1914 terminated the young poets plans to relocate with his wife in Great Britain. By this time Jeffers, the precocious student whose cosmopolitan upbringing offered a multifaceted pedagogic experience in the Universities of Europe, had already fronted the cost of his first book of poems Flagons and Apples to little literary acclaim. Despite the guidance of friend and fellow Californian poet George Sterling, Jefferss career failed to take off, garnering only little interest from New York and the East Coast long after the publication of his second book Californians in 1916 by Macmillan. Not until 1924 in the full swing of High Modernism would Jefferss Tamar and Other Poems earn him overnight notoriety in literary circles across the nation, while fanatics verging on the manic began to adulate his work in local papers across California. The subsequent success of Roan Stallion in 1925 magnified the writers clout, and expectations were high for Jefferss next book, The Woman at Point Sur, which the poet hoped would elevate his career to Faustian heights, to be published in 1925, (Zaller 34). The disappointment with which this book was met suddenly halted the course of Jefferss literary ascent; the poet earned

Dix 2 dispassionate reviews for the majority of his publications throughout the1930s and was virtually ignored by critics in the 40s. Despite this lull in Jeffers-criticism, the name has reemerged in recent decades both in anthologies and in Modernist scholarship; in recent years major literary critics including poet-critic Dana Gioia and critic Albert Gelpi have underlined the importance of Jeffers in Modernism, refuting his omission from many twentieth century anthologies and, in general, the Modernist canon. It is 1926 and Robinson Jeffers is one of the worlds most famous and perhaps one of the best known poets of the dayat least for a while (Vardamis 151). The second half of the 1920s were undoubtedly Jefferss years; his first reviews in national publications began to surface, with praises being sung from the New Republic and by contemporary Modernists like Carl Sandburg (Vardamis 165, 167). As acclaim burst from every corner of America, an explosion of Jeffers criticism was published in his home-state of Californic claiming regional pride in having a successor for unofficial California-poet following the death of George Sterling. In the wake of Sterlings death, emotions ran high and sentiments (and reviews) were often ridiculous. Local reviewers adopted a saccharine manner of attributing Jeffers to the life of Sterling: in a eulogy for Sterling published in 1927, California resident and American poet Sara Bard Field exaggerates, Not since John the Baptist pointed to the young Christhas been so large a gesture of exalted devotion as that with which George Sterling pointed to the luminous star of his own discovery (an ironic comparison considering the parochial stance of Jeffers detractors) (Vardamis 161). It is true that Jefferss most vehement fans were local California media; human interest stories in publications like San Franciscos the Examiner and Carmel-atthe-Seas Pine Cone focused on the anecdotal and romantic life of the strange poet who lived up in tower made of boulders on Carmel point, each attempting to peel a layer back from the man

Dix 3 who in California, next to George Sterling, is the poet of the highest magnitude (Vardamis 156). The image of the sage, weathered Californian poet interested reviewers for a while; a 1926 review in Poetry magazine in Chicago emphasizes the boldplunge of the Pacific on Carmels rocks in Jefferss poetry, and in 1928 prominent critic W.E. recognizes the importance of Jefferss newfound popularity to the immersion of a California literature, calling Jeffers the first genuine poet of the Pacific (Vardamis 167). But the California-centric literary reviews would also inspire a counter-opinion of Jeffers that viewed itself as the rational balancing of Jefferss criticism. One critic levelly posits in a 1927 article, This work is of slight valueMr. Sterlings criticism is mainly extravagant eulogy. The admirers of Mr. Jeffers, indeed, bid fair to damn him with excessive praises (Vardamis 158). This critic was not the only to recognize the fad that controlled most of Jefferss early popularity. A year after publishing The Women at Point Sur, Jefferss self-admitted failure, one reviewer presciently writes, Robinson is sitting on the popular pinnacle where Masters and Lindsay sat a decode or two ago. We will pray he signs a longer lease than they did (Vardamis 164-164). Jefferss popularity had by this time already eclipsed his predecessor Sterling, and critics were preparing to end his time in the limelight. Horace Gregory explains this process skeptically: Writers like Jeffers [who] are worshipped by cults frequently inspire the more academic forms of snobbery (15-16). Envy, according to Gregory, omitted Jeffers from the scholarship in literary quarterlies and poetry anthologies after his decline in popularity. Other scholars have formed less cynical hypotheses, pointing to Jefferss inconvenient location, his lack of a literary coterie (which was likely due to his outspoken condemnation of many of his peers), and other factors that made Jeffers posthumous long before he died(Zaller 29). Zaller suggests that the very clat of Jeffers debut mitigated

Dix 4 against a more lasting success (29), though he also concedes that Jefferss supposed magnum opus, The Woman at Point Sur, gravely undermined his literary reputation (Zaller 34). But the disappointment of Jefferss aging career finds its sources in a complicated web of international acclaim and vilification aimed at his contentious and under-anticipated poetic works of the 1930s and 40s. In response to the gratuitous manner with which Californian critics met Jefferss national acclaim, critics and scholars in the giant publishing hubs of the East Coast aimed to balance the Jeffersian tide. Critics often took issue with the nihilistic Nietzschean philosophy Jeffers thickly employs in his poetry (Zaller 33). His poetic affinity for themes of fraternal incest and Oedipal desire are deeply explored in Tamar, and the bestiality of Roan Stallion shocked many readers. Many critics found the beauty of his verse irreconcilable with its blatant perversion and misanthropy; the poet Witter Bynner in 1928 admitted that, while the text is usually beautiful, Jefferss poetry deteriorates into anathema against the human race (Vardamis163). Samuel Harden Church, a critic from Jefferss hometown of Pittsburgh, deepens this vein of criticism by arguing the essential beauty of [Jefferss] literature [is] sacrificed by its perverse themes, adding, is not good taste an indispensable part of great authorship? (Vardamis 164). As anticipation heightened for Jefferss new poetic installment, The Women at Point Sur, even Californian critics turned away from the trend of inordinate praise; in 1926, San Franciscos Catholic newspaper The Monitor published a review of Jeffers that personally titles him, in spite of his power and subtlety, an intrinsically terrible pagan horror (Everson 1). After the publication The Women at Point Sur in 1927, the trend in Jeffersian critique harshly changed from adulatory to disparaging. Jeffers apologists vainly tried to spread appreciation for the misanthropic poets unsettling poetry, either by defending his morality: a

Dix 5 poem that affords a valuable experience is a moral poem [emphasis mine], or refuting the import of morality at all: but I dont share his philosophy. What of it? He writes with greater poetic intensity (Vardamis 157, 166). Despite these efforts, other critics, either in looking at his poetry or analyzing its reputation, forewarned the future obfuscation of Jefferss place among the literary elite. In 1929 journalist William Harlan Hale hoped in the Yale Daily News Literary Supplement that what Robert Frost [did] for New England, and Carl Sandburg for Chicago Jeffers would do for California (Vardamis 173). These hopes were subverted by what other critics saw as lack of permanence. The unembellished opinion of a critic from Jefferss alma mater, Occidental College, presciently elucidates the Jeffers-question that would later elude scholars of the 1960s and 70s in face of Jefferss virtual disappearance: Because of his stern, somber philosophy, his ruthless realism, and his fondness for shocking themesMr. Jeffers will never achieve the popularity of Longfellow or of Eddie Guest (Vardamis 160). Though the absolute never of this argument is debatable, this critic is nearly correct. Jefferss notoriety was upheld by popular culture throughout the 1920s, but his high culture breakthrough had come to a halt; in 1929 Vanity Fair called Jeffers in an article titled We Nominate for the Hall of Fame the new Whitman, one of the first among American poets, and yet the same year he was omitted from Conrad Aikens A Comprehensive Anthology of American Poetry (Vardamis 171, 170). Still a name but not longer a fixture, Jeffers entered the 1930s. The 1930s graced Jeffers with benign lulls in criticism. The failure of The Women at Point Sur had not been forgotten, but new large-scale scandals would not manifest until the 40s following the publication of two anti-war poetry books, Be Angry at the Sun and Double Axe in 1941 and 1948 (Zaller 40). But even Jeffers could retrospectively see the broken cog that

Dix 6 damned his critical reputation; when editing his Selected Poems in 1965 Jeffers explained his omission from the collection of all but one poem from The Women at Point Sur was due to its being least understood and least liked (Zaller 34). By the 1960s Jeffers had nearly disappeared from the pages of literary review, being called by scholar Horace Gregory in 1961 a poet without critics (Gregory 15). However, from the short distance of the 1960s Gregory began a reappraisal of Jefferss work that would vindicate the poet of some of his more parochial allegations. Gregory argues that impatience and ignorance lie at the heart of Jefferss decline in popularity, saying of The Women at Point Sur, the overwhelmed reader would quickly conclude from the poems perverse themes that the poet kept bad company and was himself immoral (Gregory 20). He was too much familiar with the scene to be tactful, Gregory continues in defense of Jefferss anti-war poetry, rightly arguing, in another ten years he will probably be found less far from the truth than the majority of his contemporaries (Gregory, 22). Gregorys return to Jeffers at Modernisms end would revive an upward swing in Jeffersian criticisman outcome hoped for by Jeffers nearly 15 years prior while, discarded from the world of poetry, directing a Broadway play. The reemergence of Jeffers in academia is fascinating in its timing; as prior arguments of immorality and national subversion fell to the sexual revolution of the Beats and the Bay Area poets, Jefferss prescience began to be recognized and appreciated. In an essay commissioned by The New York Times in January 1948 titled Poetry, Gngorism, and a Thousand Years, Jeffers seems to subtly foretell this very reemergence, while also defending his unique relationship with popular Modernist literary cliques and coteries. By 1914 Jeffers had sworn of what he considered to be the fads of Modernism, symbolism and imagism, and in 1961 Horace Gregory asserts, within the last thirty years he has made no compromise with the changing fashions of the day

Dix 7 (Zaller 31, Gregory 27). Jeffers snidely reiterates this virtue of permanence in his essay: what seems to me certain is that [a great poet] would break sharply with the directions that are fashionable in contemporary poetic literature (Jeffers 423). Jeffers compares the more extreme tendencies of Modernist verse to the passing a fad in art of Spanish Gngorism and finds fault in the writers failure of critical and creative instinct (424). Though still unpopular and unreviewed, Jeffers manages to throw a few punches back in the faces of the arbiters of Modernism, the behemoth poets Pound and Eliot. As scholars return to this essay now, Jeffers appears more a model of true Modernism fighting the grains of fad and snobbery than a perverted radical in a tower by the sea. The scholar Albert Gelpi has in recent decades defended Jefferss rightful place in the modernist canon by pointing to the emersion of flourishing Bay Area poetry scene and to PostModern poets like William Everson whose poetry is very much inspired by the secluded poet from Carmel-at-the-Sea. In his article The Genealogy of Post-Modernism Gelpi posits that the great Modernist poets inevitably found the end of their careers in realizing the moral limits of the Modernist aesthetic and [superseding] it (3 Gelpi). Pound and Eliot would come to these realizations when faced with the limits of meaning. Eliots own Modernist work is considered by manyincluding the poet himselfto be autotelic, or created for the purpose and meaning of itself (an overlooked remnant of the Romantic period in Modernism). But as Modernism evolved so did Eliots poetry, and in East Coker the reader is told the poetry does not matter (Gelpi 3). For Pound, a different kind of meaning is adopted while writing his neverto-be-finished Cantos. Meaning in a larger scheme of reference and relevance finally supersedes the Modernist autotelic poem when Pound-the-speaker speaks meta-poetically of his own Cantos: it coheres all right / even if my notes do not cohere (Gelpi 3, 4). The giants of

Dix 8 Modernism learned at the end of their reign what Jeffers had known in 1914 before swearing off imagism and symbolism, and what he had reiterated in 1948 in A Thousand Years. When contemporary scholars return to Eliot and Pound one often wonders at the latent misogyny and anti-Semitism, the fostering of totalitarian dogmas (which Jeffers would decry as Mother Church and Father Statean undeniable jab at Pound and Eliot) (Zaller 34). Yet from todays perspective, Jefferss poetry is eerily prescient, a fair and gruesome warning of the end of totalitarian Europe and of the Modernism that allowed its unmitigated growth. His adherence to his unique poetic voice and his detachment from the rest of Modernism allow for this permanencea permanence he had once been blamed for lacking. Despite the worries of critics who saw Jeffers tipping in the scale of Modernist favor, Jefferss work remain meaningful, unobscured by the spirit of his confused epoch, and supersede the works of the dated Modernists (Jeffers 423). Though this 1928 review by fellow Modernist C.E.S. Woods has been criticized as a passive and blatant humbling of Pound and Eliot, his words words now hold more truth than hyperbole: I do not know of any poet so little imitativeso dramatically imaginative (Vardamis 168).

Dix 9 Works Cited Everson, William. The Excesses of God: Robinson Jeffers as a Religious Figure. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. Print. Everson, William. Robinson Jeffers Ordeal of Emergence. Ed. Robert Zaller. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1991. 123-185. Gelpi, Albert. The Genealogy of Postmodernism: Contemporary American Poetry. The Southern Review 26.3 (1990): 517-542. Web. 12 April 2014. Gregory, Horace. Poet without Critics: A Note on Robinson Jeffers. Ed. Robert. Zaller. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1991. 15-28. Print. Jeffers, Robinson. The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers: Textual Evidence and Commentary. Ed. Tim Hunt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Print. Zaller, Robert. Robinson Jeffers, American Poetry, and a Thousand Years. Ed. Robert Zaller. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1991. 29-43. Print. The Critical Reputation of Robinson Jeffers. Ed. Alex A. Vardamis. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1972. Print.