Towers of myth and stone: Yeats's influence on Robinson Jeffers 9781611175479, 9781611175486, 161117547X, 1611175488

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Towers of Myth & Stone

Towers of Myth & Stone Yeats’s Influence on Robinson Jeffers .... Deborah Fleming

The University of South Carolina Press

© 2015 University of South Carolina Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208 www.sc.edu/uscpress 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ ISBN 978-1-61117-547-9 (hardcover or cloth) ISBN 978-1-61117-548-6 (ebook) Front cover photographs background, © VTsybulka / istockphoto.com; insets from top, Thoor-Ballylee, courtesy of the author; Robinson Jeffers setting stone, courtesy of the Tor House Foundation; Hawk Tower, courtesy of the author

For Clarke

Contents Acknowledgments : ix

Chapter 1. Robinson Jeffers, W. B. Yeats, and Ecoprophecy  :  1

Chapter 2. Landscape and the Self   :  20

Chapter 3. “Two curves in the air”—Prophecy and Eternal Recurrence  :  46

Chapter 4. Solitary Hero versus Social Man—Jeffers’s Dear Judas and Yeats’s Calvary : 69

Chapter 5. Rationalism and the Great Memory of the World  :  83

Chapter 6. Radical Traditionalism : 107 Notes : 121 Bibliography : 127 Index : 137

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Acknowledgments I would like to thank James Denton, Tim Hunt, Ann Saddlemyer, and Robert Zaller for their suggestions on this manuscript. Chapters 1, 4, 5, and 6 were originally published in Jeffers Studies. Chapter 2 appeared in Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (2002), edited by J. Scott Bryson.

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1. Robinson Jeffers, W. B. Yeats, and Ecoprophecy Robinson Jeffers’s place in American literature continues to elude comparison. His work does not belong to the tradition of J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s New Eden, Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier, or Ralph Waldo Emerson’s moral philosophy. His landscapes are not those of preservationists such as John Muir. According to Wilson O. Clough, Jeffers, removed from the center of American culture, ends the long trajectory to the Pacific in a kind of “geological determinism” (The Necessary Earth, 186) that evades category: he was not transcendentalist, romantic, or naturalist. Facing the Pacific in “The Eye,” the speaker launches into prophetic spaces without Walt Whitman’s backward glance in “Facing West from California’s Shores” (211). Jeffers’s writings seem to voice Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman-farmer ideal and isolationism, but far more imminent in his poetry is the doctrine of wilderness perhaps best articulated by Max Oelschlaeger as that set of beliefs derived from Paleolithic nature worship and augmented by Darwinian evolutionary theories (The Idea of Wilderness, 245, 255). George Hart’s Inventing the Language to Tell It: Robinson Jeffers and the Biology of Consciousness explains that Jeffers’s “development of a sacramental poetics that expresses a holistic vision of a divine cosmos” and “expression of a nonanthropocentric environmental ethic” set him apart from other poets of his age (11–12). He was the first major poet to articulate the idea of nature as supreme and human beings as part of rather than master and rightful owner of the biosphere. Described by Helen Vendler as occupying a place in the tradition of oratory rather than poetry (“Soul Says,” 58), Jeffers famously distrusted the trend of modern poetry toward private symbolism and art for its own sake, “renouncing intelligibility in order to concentrate on the music of poetry.”1 He articulated

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his poetic practice in “Point Joe,” saying “Permanent things are what is needful in a poem, things temporally / Of great dimension, things continually renewed or always present” (CP, 1:90), and in his essay “Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years” (1948), explaining “Permanent things, or things forever renewed, like the grass and human passions, are the material for poetry; and whoever speaks across the gap of a thousand years will understand that he has to speak of permanent things . . .” (CP, 4:427). He chose to make his work entirely different from what he saw as the poetry of arcane illusion; although Jeffers disavowed any interest in Whitman (Selected Letters, 201), like Whitman he favored direct statement and the long narrative line. Jeffers’s stated opposition to the trends he found in modern poetry forced him for several decades to the margins of critical appraisal until a new generation of scholars found the voice of ecocentrism or deep ecology in his work. He may stand alone as the first voice of what may be called “ecoprophecy,” or he may be seen as a Modernist whose themes and focus expand the idea of what it is to be modern. While not an imitator, he belongs in the tradition of his poetic mentor W. B. Yeats, in whose work Jeffers found sources for his aesthetic and philosophic theories. Jeffers’s enforced marginalization is perhaps the major reason no full-length study of Yeats and Jeffers exists. This volume seeks to help fill that void, focusing on Yeats’s and Jeffers’s poetic and social philosophies, which bear uncanny similarities and continue to find relevance in critical and cultural theory. W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) and Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) shared a vision of modernity that rejected contemporary values in favor of tradition and created a poetry that sought to change those values. Included among Modernist poets in spite of early Romantic influence and his commitment to formalist verse, Yeats fixed his gaze on the past in order to find his thematic focus, describing his own time as “this filthy modern tide,”2 in which he and his people must forge their own nation. Both poets concerned themselves with permanence in times of fragmentation and established poetic traditions based on dramatic landscapes and cultural myth. Robinson Jeffers documented well his interest in and appreciation of Yeats’s poetic example. A 1932 letter includes Yeats’s name among those Jeffers read and imitated at times (Selected Letters, 1:200–201). To Harriet Monroe he wrote that T. S. Eliot was the only contemporary English poet he found interesting “since Yeats is Irish” (191). In other correspondence (1938) Jeffers compared himself to Yeats in “Among School Children” (263). Jeffers’s answers to an unpublished questionnaire mention Yeats among Thomas Hardy, George Moore, and “a few books of the Old Testament” (CP, 4:555) under the heading “ideas.” This document also includes Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of Yeats’s most important stylistic forebears, as an influence (CP, 4:552). A fragment dated 1950 and addressed “To Death” declares “You have Yeats and you have Una Jeffers: the voice that I admired and the woman I loved. You will never touch me

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again” (CP, 4:561). That Jeffers compared Yeats, whom he never met, to his lifelong companion may indicate something about the tenacity of Yeats’s influence. Maureen Girard included thirteen pages of notations Jeffers wrote in books by Yeats in her bibliography of Jeffers’s library at Tor House (The Last Word). While Yeats’s work established the poetic terms of decolonization and interconnectedness of culture, place, and nature, Jeffers’s voiced those of what today is called “ecocentrism”: that is, the earth or natural world, rather than the human mind, is the center of all things. Robinson Jeffers’s ecoprophecy stems from what he termed his “attitude” of Inhumanism, a reaction to the arrogance of humanism and its failure to provide human beings with god consciousness and understanding of their marginal place in the universe. Human beings, propelled by their own violent drives, remain the primary instruments of the recurring cycles of history, which will culminate in their termination. Jeffers believed that since the earth and the cosmos made human beings, only the earth and the cosmos can provide what little happiness human beings can have (ecodeterminism). Ecoprophecy is articulated by the old man in The Inhumanist when he utters “There is one God, and the earth is his prophet” (CP, 3:304), meaning that the earth holds the key to all human endeavor, whether it is survival or the creation of culture. The prophet here does not foretell the coming of God but the manifestation of God through the sublimity of natural process. Nature is not benign but majestic, violent, and indifferent. Not only is its “intelligence” found in the rock and biomass but also in human consciousness that comprehends it. The cosmos itself stands as evidence that all things including human beings and civilizations will pass away and something else will be regenerated. The earth rather than religion should hold foremost place in human consciousness although myth is a way of explaining our place in the world. Ecoprophecy is not the doom-laden result of destruction, for Jeffers believed the earth will endure. “Inhumanism” expresses his worldview, but ecoprophecy is his message. The earth and the cosmos determine the future. Human beings constitute a small part of the whole, but their meaning derives from their ability to appreciate natural beauty—not merely landscape but the intricacy of the microcosm and power of cosmic force. Jeffers’s narrative The Inhumanist, part 2 of The Double Axe (1948), probably contains Jeffers’s bitterest condemnation of civilization as well as his clearest statement of faith. It articulates his belief that God is manifest in the cosmos and that all things that exist are God and therefore divine. Nicolaus Copernicus and Charles Darwin exploded the myth of the human-centered universe, the old man states (CP, 3:274), and, through his encounters with people trekking on the mountain where he lives, he unfolds his philosophy that God is manifest in the daily, annual, and millennial cycles of the universe. Max Oelschlaeger termed

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Jeffers a “psalmist for this pantheistic god” (249) and explained that the poetry “recognizes that the modern person—the humanist of modern culture—has become Homo oeconomicus, and the world in which life plays out its course merely profane. The inhumanist, however, is a specimen of Homo religiosus, and celebrates an eternal mythical present: a living-God in the world” (249). Oelschlaeger went on to say, “The psychic allure of Jeffers’s ecological vision is that nature and God, rent asunder by the modern mind, are reunited” (253). The concept of ecocentrism has existed for millennia in the religion of nature worship that most Paleolithic people engaged in. They worshipped wild nature and took for symbols the great hunt and the fertility goddess; myth is the account of origins (10), and reenacting sacred time makes it possible to reexperience the cosmos at the mythical moment of creation (40). Modern philosophic and scientific language, however, obscures wild nature (243). The old man in Jeffers’s poem, a caretaker at an abandoned ranch, asks whether God exists and answers that the evidence lies in the cells of his body, which “feel each other and are fitted together” (CP, 3:256). All the atoms in the universe are aware of every other atom. He rejects tribal and anthropoid gods, which are mere projections of human fears and desires (CP, 3:257), and embraces the pantheistic God revealed in the wheeling hawk and the dawn. Jeffers rejected notions of an Edenic past or innocence. “Original Sin” (1948) describes prehistoric people engaged in brutal killing of a great woolly mammoth. Human beings should behave as much as possible like the natural creatures, as shown in “Boats in a Fog.” In spite of his nearly reclusive life and exclusive focus on the landscape of Big Sur, Jeffers is the major voice in the twentieth century that articulates the national experience in the larger context of Western civilization, and in so doing he is the true inheritor of Whitman’s poetic tradition. It is well to note that Jeffers is also the major American poet of the long narrative. In order to achieve his vision, Jeffers turned to the example of Yeats, who dedicated his energy to the creation of a national literature. Engaging Yeats’s work enabled Jeffers to develop a related, though distinct, sense of what themes and subject matter were best suited for poetic endeavor. His connection to Yeats helps to explain the nature of Jeffers’s poetry even as it helps to clarify Yeats’s influence on those who followed him; moreover, Jeffers’s interest in Yeats indicates that critics misunderstand Jeffers if they take his rejection of Modernism (as exemplified by Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams) as a rejection either of contemporary poetry or the processes by which modern poetry came into being. For Jeffers, Yeats was the only ancestor (and contemporary) who articulated what poetry in the twentieth century should be about and the one who led from the past (especially the Romantic tradition) to the present and pointed the way to the future. His interest in Yeats places Jeffers within the Modernist tradition rather than primarily outside it and

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shows that he cannot be adequately understood as a regionalist, isolationist misanthrope. At the same time, a comparison of the two may reveal more about engenderment of poetic themes that draw extensively from tradition but are necessarily changed in the modern era—Jeffers’s and Yeats’s uses of landscape, belief in historical cycles, appropriation of myth, rejection of Enlightenment rationalism, and redefinition of traditionalism. Scholars and critics have noted thematic and stylistic parallels between Yeats’s and Jeffers’s work and the unmistakable Yeatsian echoes throughout Jeffers’s poetry from “The Coast-Range Christ” (1940) to “Granddaughter” (1963)— and this in spite of Jeffers’s having used mostly long, unrhymed, accentually metered lines and favored the poetry of direct statement while Yeats remained symbolist and formalist. Jeffers’s “Birthday” (1941) for example delves into that traditional Yeatsian theme of old age and desire for youth: Time to grow old; Not to take in sail and be safe and temperate, But drive the hull harder, drive the bows under. Time to grow hard And solitary: to a man past fifty the hot-eyed Girls are still beautiful, but he is not. Time to grow passionate. Girls that take off their clothes and the naked truth Have a quality in common: both are accessible. (CP, 3:19) Jeffers’s poem includes the Yeatsian obsession with time, the nautical metaphor of “Sailing to Byzantium” (1928), the need of old men to be solitary with their memories, and the wish expressed in “Politics” (1939) that the poet could be young again and in the company of beautiful girls. Jeffers employed the Yeatsian phrase “the host of the air” (from “The Host of the Air,” 1893) in “To the House” (1924), and it is difficult not to think of Yeats’s verse when one reads “The sweet forms dancing on through flame and shade” (CP, 1:7) in Jeffers’s “Consciousness” (1926) and the epithets in the first line of “Granite and Cypress” (1925): “Whitemaned, wide-throated, the heavy-shouldered children of the wind leap at the sea-cliff ” (CP, 1:105). Jeffers’s “Natural Music” (1924) shares with Yeats’s “To a Child Dancing in the Wind” (1912) the image of a child (a girl in Jeffers; Yeats’s poem does not make clear the gender but suggests a girl with the lines “tumble out your hair / That the salt drops have wet” [CW, 1:122] and the revelation in the following poem titled “Two Years Later” [1914] that the child will “Suffer as your mother suffered” [CW, 1:122]) dancing on a shoreline heedless of personal suffering or human folly. In Yeats’s poem, however, the threatening sound of the wind becomes “monstrous crying,” while in Jeffers’s “Natural Music” the

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voices of ocean and rivers “intone one language” (CP, 1:6), and if listeners could separate themselves from “the storm of the sick nations” (similar to the “fool’s triumph” and “the best labourer dead” in Yeats’s poem), they would find those natural voices “Clean as a child’s.” In both poems, danger is present and revealed in the image of a storm, innocence by a girl dancing. In “Granddaughter” (1963) the speaker looks at a portrait painted three years earlier, when the girl was two. After comparing her changed temperament he comments that he hopes she will find the “beauty of transhuman things” but concludes with his wish that “she will find / Powerful protection and a man like a hawk to cover her” (CP, 3:464). Yeats’s much longer poem for his daughter, dated June 1919, begins with the speaker praying for his infant girl during a storm that provides a metaphor for his own turbulent emotions. Above all the father wishes happiness for the girl, which will come through muted beauty, privacy, self-possession, and stability—everything opposite what Yeats found in the fiery, captivating Maud Gonne. The speaker concludes with a wish for his daughter’s marriage to one who will provide “custom” (“the spreading laurel tree”) and “ceremony” (“the rich horn”), suggesting tradition and permanence (CW, 1:190). The influence of Yeats on Jeffers’s poetry began well in advance of “The Coast-Range Christ.” In Jeffers’s early work, echoes of Yeats sound more clearly than those of the Pre-Raphaelites who influenced them both. “The Measure” (1903) opens with the dominant theme of Jeffers’s work to the end: the greatness of the universe as compared with the insignificance of human existence. Compare this to the 1885 poem with which Yeats has greeted readers since the publication of his collected works in 1933: “The Song of the Happy Shepherd,” where the pastoral singer employs archaic diction and inversion to lament the loss of old idealism and romanticism. Yeats’s poem uses “thine,” “guile,” and “sooth” (CW, 1:7–8); Jeffers’s poem employs “Old mother Earth,” “giveth,” and “naught” (CP, 4:5). In both poems the speakers admonish the reader not to trust too implicitly in science (“the starry men” in Yeats, “mighty men” in Jeffers) nor in learning; they make reference to astronomy, universal vastness, and fate; and they undercut their own message even as they articulate it: Jeffers’s poem employs Italian sonnet form, developed during a time of emerging humanism, to question human relevance, while Yeats’s praises and questions the ability of poetry to reveal truth (“Words alone are certain good”; “Seek . . . no word of theirs”). Jeffers’s “The Cruelty of Love” (1912) deals with that most Yeatsian of themes, passionate but unrequited love, in language reminiscent of Yeats’s “When You Are Old” (1893). The poetic speaker enjoins the beloved when she sits quietly in her chamber to think about his love for her as he wanders—the beach in Jeffers, “pouring my soul on the wind” (CP, 4:18), the mountain in Yeats, where

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Love “hid his face amid a crowd of stars” (CW, 1:41). Jeffers’s “Her Praises” (1912) shares with Yeats’s poem the idea that among the beloved’s many moods, the speaker loves and praises her solemn earnestness (CP, 4:14–15). In “When You Are Old” it is the woman’s “pilgrim soul” and “sorrows of [her] changing face.” “Let Us Go Home to Paradise” (1916) uses the image of “dove-gray seas” (CP, 4:68) as Yeats uses “dove-grey sands” in his 1896 work “A Poet to His Beloved” (CW, 1:63) and “dove-grey faerylands” (CW, 1:66) in “The Lover Asks Forgiveness Because of His Many Moods” (1895). With their frequent images of waving arms, parted lips, dim hair—as well as “dim heavy hair” (CW, 1:66) and “long heavy hair” (62)—and “cloud-pale eyelids” (67), the poems in Yeats’s 1899 volume The Wind among the Reeds may have inspired the images of “pale eyelids” and “lips and eyelids” in Jeffers’s poems “The Longing” (1912, CP, 4:25) and “Her Praises” (CP, 4:14). “The Moon’s Girls” (1907) employs imagery of “waving arms,” “green fairies in the dell,” “misty shapes,” maids “heavy-haired, / Slenderformed and misty-pale,” “fairy charms,” and “midnight hair” (CP, 4:11–12) as well as the theme of searching in vain for a fairy maid as in Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (1897). Romantic poetry influenced Jeffers’s early work, but the ways in which he departed from the tradition resemble Yeats’s early poems through The Wind among the Reeds. Poems from The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892) may have informed Jeffers’s early (mostly 1912) poems “The Cruelty of Love,” “Nemesis,” “A Philosophy,” “The Longing,” “To Helen, Whose Remembrance Leaves No Peace,” “Salt Sand,” “On the Lake,” and “Something Remembered,” in which the speaker begins “The shadow of an old love yesterday / Went by me on the street” (CP, 4:16). “To Helen about Her Hair” (1912) uses the image of the beautiful woman combing her hair and “Shaking its splendor out” where his soul is caught (CP, 4:17). “Fauna” (1924) contains the image of the witch who has wound the lover in her bright hair (244) as well as multiple references to dancing on the “dim shore” (234–50). The dreamy diction in section 7 of the long lyric “Maldrove” (1916) could have been inspired by some of Yeats’s early poems: O dreams, O more innumerable than sand, Or salt flakes of the sea-froth driven and beaten On sands the west wind and the north have smitten, The southeast wind and the east wind from the land Have piled with wilder dunes and fiercelier bitten With seaward gullies—O visions of my dreaming, Numberless as the sea-wrack tossed and streaming! (CP, 4:170) “To Canidia” (1912) makes use of the image of the witch girl who entraps the lover by “enchantments,” song, and “woven charms” (CP, 4:36) like the “woven shade” of Yeats’s “Who Goes with Fergus?” published in 1899 (CW, 1:43). “To

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Canidia,” however, ends in the lover’s resolution to free himself of the spell, which Yeats’s lovers are never able to do. “The Palace” (1914), an unpublished poem, mentions the curlew called in by “fathers of old time” (CP, 4:440–41) to cry in empty rooms and continues “The wind in the weeds / Is a better harp than a harp.” Yeats’s poem “He Reproves the Curlew,” published in The Wind among the Reeds, demands that the bird cry no more or only to the West because its crying brings to the speaker’s mind the “Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair” of a lover (CW, 1:62). Jeffers’s early poems, somewhat derivative and lacking the depth of the later work, nevertheless reveal a formidable control of meter and rhyme as well as maturing poetic sensibility.3 The long poem “Storm as Deliverer” (1917–18), written in ottava rima stanzas, presents an interesting psychology of a woman contemplating adultery and concludes with the denunciation of humankind that pervades Jeffers’s later work (CP, 4:256–77). “The Songs of the Dead Men to the Three Dancers” (1917–18) are meant to be performed since three figures—who are Desire, Death, and Victory—enter and dance as the poem is read (CP, 4:223–33). Jeffers found this form at the same time Yeats published At the Hawk’s Well (1917), the first of his Four Plays for Dancers, the others being The Dreaming of the Bones (1919), The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), and Calvary (1920). Jeffers’s “A Redeemer” (1928) employs the same scarecrow image as Yeats did in “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Among School Children” published in 1928 in The Tower. Yeats’s “aged man” is a “tattered coat upon a stick” in the first poem (CW, 1:193) and a “comfortable kind of old scarecrow” in the second (CW, 1:216). Jeffers’s old prophet living in the mountains remarks “God’s a scare-crow, no vengeance out of old rags” (CP, 1:407). Some of Jeffers’s mature verse shows evidence of Yeats’s influence as well. “Tor House” (1926) shares with Yeats’s truncated English sonnet “The Cold Heaven” (1912) the image of ghosts walking on earth after death. While Yeats’s poem begins with the image of rooks flying in the heavens, which “seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice” (CW, 1:125), Jeffers’s poem describes the flight of gulls over the ocean in imagery reminiscent of Yeats: “Come in the morning you will see white gulls / Weaving a dance over blue water, the wane of the moon / Their dance-companion” (CP, 1:408). Cassandra’s utterance in The Tower beyond Tragedy (1925) that she has watched “the world cataractlike / Pour screaming onto steep ruins” (CP, 1:144) may have found its source in Yeats’s “The Mountain Tomb” (1914), where “The cataract smokes upon the mountain side” (CW, 1:121). Structural features of “For Una” (1941) bear a resemblance to Yeats’s “Man and the Echo” (1939), including the use of refrain in a meditation that begins by situating the speaker in a specific locale (Hawk Tower in Jeffers, a glen on the side of Sligo’s Knocknarea Mountain in Yeats), progresses to the poet’s inability to reconcile current events with his life’s work, and concludes with the abrupt return to the immediate surroundings.

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Jeffers expressed admiration of Yeats most remarkably in building Hawk Tower in imitation of Yeats’s restored Norman castle Thoor Ballylee. The most comprehensive study of Yeats’s and Jeffers’s use of their towers as poetic tropes is Theodore Ziolkowski’s The View from the Tower: Origins of an Antimodernist Image (1998), which explains the antimodernist stance of the tower as the place to which the poet retreats in order to separate himself from the everyday yet also to meditate and imagine. Such isolation enables the poet to contemplate, in order to maintain a universal worldview. Yeats and Jeffers employed the tower as a central image for their resistance to much of the modern world they disliked; as a manifestation of cultural conservatism opposed to the spiritual, intellectual, and political upheavals of the early twentieth century; and as emblem in opposition to the modern, urban technological world. Ziolkowski maintained that the literary image assumes an immediacy: writers actualized their resistance to modern society by taking up residence in towers that embodied the past (xi–xv). Yeats’s move to Thoor Ballylee represents his retreat from modern cities and what he perceived as mob rule and his turn toward the ancient countryside (Ziolkowski, 45–46). The tower linked him with the Irish past, with the AngloIrish ascendancy and (for him) its history and intellectual pride, and with the estate of his friend Lady Gregory, whose shared interest in Irish subjects led to the founding of the Irish National Theatre. The tower was situated on her estate when Yeats first visited it; he purchased it in 1917 from the Congested Districts Board, which had acquired it during the break-up of some of the larger estates (Ziolkowski, 47). Yeats used the emblem in “Ego Dominus Tuus,” written in 1915, where he set the scene on “the grey sand beside the shallow stream / Under your old wind-beaten tower, where still / A lamp burns on beside the open book . . .” (CW, 1:160). The images of tower, lamp, and book also figure in “The Phases of the Moon,” written after he had acquired the tower but not yet moved in. Earlier he articulated the meaning of the symbolic tower in “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry” (1900), which contains the explanation of the tower as “man’s far-seeing mind” (CW, 4:66) and the mind looking outward from a spiritual and intellectual height: The tower, important in Maeterlinck, as in Shelley, is, like the sea, and rivers, and caves with fountains, a very ancient symbol, and would perhaps, as years went by, have grown more important in his poetry. The contrast between it and the cave in Laon and Cythna suggests a contrast between the mind looking outward upon men and things and the mind looking inward upon itself. . . . It is only by ancient symbols, by symbols that have numberless meanings beside the one or two the writer lays an emphasis upon, or the half-score he knows of, that any highly subjective

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art can escape from the barrenness and shallowness of a too conscious arrangement, into the abundance and depth of Nature. (CW, 4:66) In “A Tower on the Apennines,” a section from “Discoveries” (1906), Yeats described a vision of a medieval tower that he caught a glimpse of at sunset as he crossed the mountains near Urbino on foot “alone amid a visionary, fantastic, impossible scenery” (CW, 4:211). He saw “in the mind’s eye an old man, erect and a little gaunt, standing in the door of the tower,” a poet who had “come to share in the dignity of the saint” (211). For Yeats, Urbino represented the educated class, whose wealth and influence lifted the common people into appreciation of their own art and culture. He made this view clear in “To a Wealthy Man Who Promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if It Were Proved the People Wanted Pictures” (1913), where the poet tells the wealthy man to imitate Duke Ercole, Guidobaldo of Urbino, and Cosimo, who did not rely on the will of the common people but gave their wealth to uplift the culture as a whole. The poet advises the man to be generous and disregard public opinion: Look up in the sun’s eye and give What the exultant heart calls good That some new day may breed the best Because you gave, not what they would, But the right twigs for an eagle’s nest! (CW, 1:108) The tower, its tradition going back to Homer, gave Yeats the “numberless meanings” to create his subjective art that could transcend the “barrenness” of the modern. While similar images inform the poems in The Tower and The Winding Stair, as Ziolkowski showed, the symbol of the tower underwent many changes. While in “Ego Dominus Tuus” (1917) the poet is not yet ready to enter the tower of introspection, in “The Phases of the Moon” he projects himself into the tower while his own creations—Owen Aherne and Michael Robartes—jeer at him for his struggle to find “mysterious wisdom won by toil” (CW, 1:163). The poet succeeds, however, in finding wisdom and puts the candle out. The Wild Swans at Coole includes “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” (1918), a reminiscence of someone who cannot visit him in the tower (Gregory died in the Great War), and “A Prayer on Going into My House” (1918), in which the poet adopts the point of view of one who has not yet entered. The last poem of Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) celebrates his entry into the house but ironically focuses on its eventual ruin: the tower represents for him beginning and ending as well as cyclic history. While he inhabits Thoor Ballylee, however, he will be in touch with traditional values even though he knows they will eventually be lost.

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Robinson Jeffers, W. B. Yeats, and Ecoprophecy

The tower was more than habitation: it was a symbol of poetic ancestors John Milton and Percy Bysshe Shelley and a haven of traditional Anglo-Irish values (Ziolkowski, 54–55). Ziolkowski described the evolution of Yeats’s symbol of the tower, concluding In the course of some forty years, then, Yeats’s image of the tower developed from a conventional romantic topos (tower, lamp, book) first to an icon for the retreat of the poet and his immediate family, then to an emblem for Ireland, next to a symbol of human consciousness, maturing in the winding gyres of its stairway, and finally, on its ramparts, to a springboard into the cosmos. The turning point from conventional topos to a larger image came almost precisely at the moment when Yeats purchased and moved into Thoor Ballylee: the stages of its development correspond with great precision to the periods of extended stay at Ballylee (1919, 1922, 1926, and 1927). As long as he stood outside, the tower remained the lonely tower of the romantic poet stooped over his Plato. Once he entered its premises, the spiraling ascent to the top and the view from the battlements over time and space afforded the perspectives from which the tower could become its own “monument of unageing intellect.” (68) The poet’s private symbol emerging from a traditional one, the tower as both habitation and emblem enables him to bring his life at least temporarily closer to art. It was haunted, like all human history but especially Irish history (Smith, W. B. Yeats, 66), and was a repository of the Great Memory (which will be discussed in chapter 5). While Yeats renovated an old tower that had both private and public significance, Jeffers constructed his own. His wife, Una, also admired Yeats and wanted Robin to build the tower, so he worked alongside the masons who built Tor House in order to learn their craft. He chose to live in the Carmel Valley because he loved the coast and its people whose way of life seemed timeless: for the first time in my life I could see people living—amid magnificent unspoiled scenery—essentially as they did in the Idyls or the Sagas, or in Homer’s Ithaca. Here was life purged of its ephemeral accretions. Men were riding after cattle, or plowing the headland, hovered by white seagulls, as they have done for thousands of years, and will for thousands of years to come. Here was contemporary life that was also permanent life. . . . (Foreword to The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, CP, 4:392) This passage echoes Yeats’s sentiments on Irish nationality: “Wherever men have tried to imagine a perfect life, they have imagined a place where men plow and sow and reap, not a place where there are great wheels turning and great chimneys vomiting smoke. Ireland will always be a country where men plow

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and sow and reap” (qtd. in Ellmann, The Man and the Masks, 113). The tower represented nature and isolation for Jeffers: the stones that had rolled in the sea for thousands of years would endure longer than the poet, the society, and nation he lived in, or even the human species. At the same time Tor House and Hawk Tower allowed him to withdraw from that society in order to avoid its corrupting influences—greed, narcissism, desire for power, and love of luxury. Considerably smaller than Thoor Ballylee, Hawk Tower has a square shape that suggests it: “The image of the tower as it emerged in his [Jeffers’s] poetry during the twenties marked a radicalization of the romantic image of the lonely tower of introspection” (Ziolkowski, 81). Yeats’s renovation of Ballylee clearly followed from his desire to steep all this work in ancestral and national history. Hawk Tower contained no such ancestral or national significance but was instead Jeffers’s emblem of his own personal and poetic isolation. Jeffers may ultimately have spent more time in his tower. The Yeats family occupied Ballylee only during summers between 1919 and 1927 while Jeffers lived in Carmel most of his life. Jeffers’s major work invoking the imagery of the tower is The Tower beyond Tragedy (1925), his translation and adaptation of The Oresteia, which concerns the murders of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra and of Clytemnestra by Orestes. To these Greek sources Jeffers added an attempt by Electra to persuade Orestes to seize power and finally his abjuration of power by leaving the city and entering the natural world. Orestes climbs “the tower beyond time” (CP, 1:178) and enters “the earlier fountain,” his isolation: “The work ends with this invocation of ‘the tower beyond time’—that is, the mythical ideal of a timeless state of detachment that may be achieved by those who have endured tragedy and thus passed beyond it” (Ziolkowski, 90). Jeffers explained that his idea in The Tower beyond Tragedy was to present dramatically “that liberation which the witness is supposed to feel—to let one of the agonists be freed, as the audience is expected to be, from passion and other birth-marks of humanity. Therefore, beyond tragedy . . . tragedy and what results” (Selected Letters, 35). In other works Jeffers used the image of the tower to evoke feelings of isolation, strength, or pride. California in Roan Stallion (1925) is described as “erect and strong as a new tower” (CP, 1:179). Jesus in Dear Judas (1929) declares that his soul “is all towers” (CP, 2:15). The poet’s message in “To a Young Artist” (1928) is that unconsciousness is the “treasure, the tower, the fortress” (CP, 1:395). “Night” mentions the lamp in his tower and the mountain flocks moving among stems “like towers  / Of the old redwoods” (CP, 1:114–15). Ziolkowski concluded, “For Jeffers, then, the tower that he built for his wife in imitation of Yeats’s tower at Ballylee provided the real and symbolic refuge from which, with Horation irony and the Lucretian detachment that he called Inhumanism, he contemplated what he regarded as the inevitable disintegration of civilization and the reassuring timelessness of the natural world” (95).

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Robinson Jeffers, W. B. Yeats, and Ecoprophecy

Jeffers’s work shares more with Yeats’s than use of imagery and language. Like Yeats, Jeffers created mythologies, rooted his work in a deep sense of place imbued with folklore, embraced the notion of a cyclical theory of history, and incorporated elements of the ghostly and supernatural. In his essay “Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years” (1948), which praises Yeats as the great poet who speaks beyond his time, Jeffers remarked that “great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts” (CP, 4:425). Yeats made much the same observation when, in “The Celtic Element in Literature” (1897), he explained the Celtic “natural magic” as “the ancient religion of the world, the ancient worship of nature” (CW, 4:130). The great tragic figures of literature, he asserted, have come “out of legends and are indeed but the images of the primitive imagination” (134). Both poets lived during times of dramatic historical change, rejected Christianity while retaining its symbolism and their belief in God, informed their ideas of eternal recurrence through the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and lamented the passing of traditions they valued, although for Yeats those traditions were founded upon older civilizations while Jeffers considered all civilization inherently corrupt and embraced solitude and ideas about the centrality of nature that have come to be called “deep ecology.” They saw ugliness and chaos in the new technology they distrusted. To Yeats the Victorians and William Wordsworth adulterated poetry with their ethical and “improving” stand (Watson, “Yeats, Victorianism, and the 1890s,” 40). The business of poetry, Yeats made clear in section 3 of “Art and Ideas” (The Cutting of an Agate, 1924), was to reveal timeless truths exemplified by “those wanderers who still stitch into their carpets among the Mongolian plains religious symbols so old they have not even a meaning” (CW, 4:253). Like many moderns, he distrusted notions of progress, empiricism, and rationalism, embracing instead myth, tradition, folklore, and rootedness wherein lay those poetic verities. In his note to The Resurrection (1931) Yeats asserted that, when he was a boy, “everybody talked about progress, and rebellion against my elders took the form of aversion to that myth. I took satisfaction in certain public disasters, felt a sort of ecstasy at the contemplation of ruin . . .” (CW, 2:722). In “The Symbolism of Poetry” (Ideas of Good and Evil, 1900) Yeats referred to “the slow dying of men’s hearts that we call the progress of the world” (CW, 4:120). F. A. C. Wilson has argued that the final couplet of “The Black Tower” drives home Yeats’s aversion to the Victorian belief in progress and counters with Heraclitus’s (and, one may include, William Blake’s) belief that not only could the tension of opposites not be resolved, it also created the source for art (W. B. Yeats and Tradition, 225). When Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus claims in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (251) that he wants to find the beauty that has not yet come into the world, he rejects the sentiments of Yeats’s Robartes, who seeks the beauty that has gone out of the world (“He Remembers Forgotten Beauty,” 1896).

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Harold Bloom termed Yeats a romantic (in Adams, 166), while Hazard Adams referred to him as “an anomaly—a modern romantic poet” (The Book of Yeats’s Vision, 161).4 Jeffers also distrusted Enlightenment empiricism and denied that freedom meant material abundance, saying in “Shine, Republic” (1935), “Freedom is poor and laborious; that torch is not safe but hungry, and often requires blood for its fuel” (CP, 2:417). Like Yeats he seems to celebrate the apocalypse, believing as Yeats did that it would signal the commencement of a new age and that cultures resembled nature in their cycles of death, transformation, and rebirth. According to Tim Hunt, Jeffers shared with many modernists their belief that science, economics, society, and increasing violence threatened the continuity of the culture which nevertheless required aesthetic renewal (“Robinson Jeffers,” 246). For Jeffers that renewal stemmed from the beauty and permanence of nature. Standing in opposition to what Yeats referred to as “this filthy modern tide”—mob rule, loss of aristocratic values, democratization of culture, and destruction of the land—Yeats, and Jeffers later, posed their values of folk (and in Yeats’s case, aristocratic) tradition, the value of landscape and place, the Great Memory of the earth, which contained all times at once, myth and symbol, and the centrality of poetry. Their philosophy may be said to resemble in some ways that of Martin Heidegger, who in An Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) opposed the notion of rationality and the universalizing machine—which David Harvey has claimed is represented by the Bauhaus and the architecture of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe—and proposed rootedness and environmentally bound traditions as foundations for social and political action (The Condition of Postmodernity, 35). At the same time, Yeats and Jeffers nevertheless belonged to the Modernist tradition, believing in and even celebrating the disintegration of the present culture and the coming of the next great historical era. Through the paradigm of poetry they formulated their Nietzschean theories of eternal recurrence and creation of myth. Does Yeats’s and Jeffers’s rebellion against the modern world and its values make them Antimodernists, or even Romantics, since they began their careers before the Modernist period? George Bornstein described Yeats’s artistic choice as a “thoroughly historicized modernism both re-rooted and re-routed in the earth” (Material Modernism, 81). Daniel Albright posited the beginning of Modernism with Charles Baudelaire, who in The Painter of Modern Life (1864), wrote: “Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable” (qtd. in Albright, 65). Albright went on to assert that, if Modernism is defined as the art of urban junk, “Yeats is the least Modernist of poets” (65); while most of those writers labeled Modernists— for example, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf—were at home in the cities,

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Robinson Jeffers, W. B. Yeats, and Ecoprophecy

Yeats’s attitude toward them—in spite of the fact that he lived much of his life in London or Dublin—implies contempt: “When I stand upon O’Connell bridge [Dublin] in the half-light and notice the discordant architecture, all those electric signs, where modern heterogeneity has taken physical form, a vague hatred comes up out of my own dark” (“A General Introduction for My Work,” Essays & Introductions, 526). Albright further described Modernism—referring to a passage from A Vision (1925) in which Yeats lamented the vast separation of myth from everyday fact in the work of Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Luigi Pirandello—as “a heap of urban garbage weirdly juxtaposed with antique glamor” (Albright, 66). Yet, while Yeats drew his symbols from tradition rather than from modern urban life and claimed that terms such as “steam roller” were dead and unpoetic— no word being fit for poetry unless thirty centuries had sanctified it—still, technology makes its dramatic appearance in his work, from the “brazen hawks” of “Meditations in Time of Civil War” whose “innumerable clanging wings . . . have put out the moon” (CW, 1:206) to the “Aeroplane and Zeppelin” of “Lapis Lazuli” (Albright, 67–68). Albright concluded by claiming Yeats as essentially Modernist: “Yeats fights Modernism as hard as he can, only to find himself acknowledging that he is Modernist to the marrow of his bones” (75). Helen Vendler asked the same question of whether Yeats is the last Romantic as he claimed in “Coole and Ballylee, 1931”or the first Modernist, stating that for some critics his writing formalist verse excludes him from the Modernist label (“The Later Poetry,” 79). Her answer is that his originality, insouciance, and sometimes blasphemy in his use of forms and traditional symbols (for example, his Madonna is a “common woman,” his whore—Crazy Jane—a lover in the Romantic tradition as well as a philosopher and theologian) remove him from Romantic and Victorian modes and place him firmly as an iconoclastic Modernist (79). “Like all the best Modernists,” Vendler wrote in Our Secret Discipline, “he disturbed forms without entirely abandoning them” (181). She also defined the term as “individual,” “wayward,” and “secular” (“The Later Poetry,” 84), all of which define both Yeats and Jeffers. To answer the question about Yeats’s distaste for the modern world and Jeffers’s rejection of Modernist tendencies in poetry, one might assert that they are not Antimodernists in Albright’s sense but rather antimodern Modernists in Vendler’s sense, distrustful of technology but fully capable of facing the world as they found it and making meaning through their poetry while transcending the material urban world of pavements, neon signs, and machines. Yeats’s early poetry and Jeffers’s solitude notwithstanding, their poetry is anything but escapist. Jeffers, like Yeats, rejected the modern trope of the impersonality of the artist exemplified in the work of Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot. Instead he transformed himself through identification with place and creation of personae. Winfield Townley Scott, in speaking of Jeffers, claimed that Yeats was the only

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other modern poet who could “so powerfully make himself his own protagonist” (“Jeffers: The Undeserved Neglect,” 173). In Estrangement (1909) Yeats called this “the tradition of myself ” (CW, 3:342), created only through the act of writing. William Nolte asserted that Jeffers admired Yeats most of all moderns, that both have been called fascists, but that what appeared to be fascism was their unwillingness to subscribe to political or religious dogma, both being more concerned with the values that direct human beings (“Robinson Jeffers as a Didactic Poet,” 216–18). R. P. Blackmur claimed that Yeats searched for a mode of expression, not a dogma to express (“W. B. Yeats,” 64–79); the same could definitely be said Jeffers. They adopted the stance of someone outside their own time, looking at events not from the microcosm of the present but the macrocosm of the recurring cycles of history. In Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems, John Felstiner identified Yeats as Jeffers’s inspiration for his oracular poems (175). The business of poetry, both Yeats and Jeffers concluded, involved notions of history, nationhood, and landscape. When Jeffers put forth his philosophy of poetry and what the great poet should aspire to in “Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years,” he discussed Yeats’s example at length, indicating that Jeffers’s philosophy is not so far removed in temperament from that of the major poet of the twentieth century: To return now to the great poet whom we have imagined arising among us at this time. He would certainly avoid the specialists, the Gongorist groups, and he would hardly expect response from the average, the average educated person: then whom should he speak to? For poetry is not a monologue in a vacuum: it is written in solitude, but it needs to have some sort of audience in mind. Well: there has been a great poet in our time—must I say comparatively great?—an Irishman named Yeats, and he met this problem, but his luck solved it for him. The first half of his life belonged mostly to the specialists, the Celtic Twilight people, the Decadents, even the Gongorists; he was the best among them but not a great poet, and he resented it. He had will and ambition, while Dowson and the others dropped by the wayside. Yeats went home to Ireland and sought in the theater his liberation from mediocrity; and he might possibly have found it there, if he had been as good a playwright as he was a poet. For the theater—unless it is a very little one—cannot belong wholly to a group; it has to be filled if possible; and it does not inevitably belong to the average. When many people together see and hear the thing—if it is fierce enough, and the actors and author can make it beautiful,—it cuts deep. It cuts through many layers. The average person may even forget his education and delight in it, though it is poetry.

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Robinson Jeffers, W. B. Yeats, and Ecoprophecy

But Yeats found in another way his immortality. He was not a first-rate playwright but he had an insuperable will; and when his Ireland changed, he was ready. Suddenly, in that magic time when a country becomes a nation, it was Ireland’s good fortune that there was a great poet in Ireland. Her unique need, and his will, had produced him. (CP, 4:425–26) Thus Jeffers identified Yeats as a national poet created in part by the culture itself. The great poet spoke about a place to its people, Jeffers believed. Yeats also confirmed his conviction that the poetry of a nation could not be separated from the land; he wrote in The Trembling of the Veil (1922): “Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology that marries them to rock and hill?” (CW, 3:167). Yeats’s great mentor John O’Leary taught him that “there is no fine nationality without literature . . . no fine literature without nationality” (qtd. in Bornstein, “Yeats and Romanticism,” 19). “Does not the greatest poetry always require a people to listen to it?” Yeats wrote in “The Galway Plains” (1903); “The poet must always prefer the community where the perfected minds express the people, to a community that is vainly seeking to copy the perfected minds” (CW, 4:158). In “Ireland and the Arts” (1901), he stated his conviction that he would have “Ireland recreate the ancient arts . . . as they were understood when they moved a whole people and not a few people who have grown up in a leisured class . . .” (CW, 4:152). Finding inspiration in Yeats’s example, Jeffers identified himself with the dramatic western coast of his country, inhabited by people who lived in traditional ways; many of them also believed the hills and valleys to be haunted as did the people of Yeats’s Sligo and Galway. Yeats and Jeffers associated myth with place and sought to recreate their own localities through the poetry and make them visible to people who might have overlooked their significance. While Jeffers based his poetic philosophy on the centrality of nature, Yeats wrote in a letter to Sturge Moore (September 21, 1927), “As you know, all my art theories depend upon just this—rooting of mythology in the earth” (qtd. in Ziolkowski, The View from the Tower, 62). Thinking of either poet involves necessarily thinking of their localities. As James Baird said of Jeffers in “Robinson Jeffers and the Wilderness God of the Old Testament,” it is impossible to think of Jeffers without thinking of Carmel (10). It is similarly difficult when one reads Yeats not to think of the Sligo coast, Galway countryside, or historic Dublin. Yeats’s poems set in the landscape of Ben Bulben, Glencar, Coole Park, and Ballylee become a poetic map of places in Sligo and Galway. Similarly Jeffers named Point Joe, Soveranes Creek, and Carmel itself again and again—even titling one poem “Point Pinos and Point Lobos” as Yeats named a poem “Coole and Ballylee, 1931.” In the poems these localities achieve the status first of artistic and then of mythic landscape. Jeffers seemed to invite association between his own locality

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and Irish myth when in “Ossian’s Grave” (1928–29) he compared the coasts of Antrim and Carmel. Looking at the prehistoric monument near Cushendall in Antrim, Jeffers wrote: I also make a remembered name; And I shall return home to the granite stones On my cliff over the greatest ocean. . . (CP, 2:108) In “Apology for Bad Dreams” (1926) he described the coast “crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places” (CP, 1:209). Jeffers, however, is not derivative; for the California poet, as not for Yeats, landscape is far greater than tragedy. In “An Irish Headland” (1932), Jeffers described the beauty of the earth as “too great to weep for” (CP, 2:172). Inseparable from landscape, animals, and especially birds, figure prominently in Jeffers’s poetry as they do in Yeats’s. In Jeffers’s sonnet “Love the Wild Swan” (1935) the presence of wild creatures shows the speaker the uselessness of despair but also of art; as in Yeats’s “The Wild Swans at Coole” (1917) the real birds outlast the romantic image. In Jeffers’s “Birds” (1925)—a paean to those of the coast—sparrowhawks, seagulls, and falcons fly, “Their wings to the wild spirals of the wind-dance . . . out of the limitless / Power of the mass of the sea . . . musically clamorous” (CP, 1:108), reminiscent of the “bell-beat” of “clamorous wings” in Yeats’s poem as he watches the swans “wheeling in great broken rings” (CW, 1.131). Swans occupy a place in Jeffers’s work as important as they do in Yeats’s: a late lyric describes a lake with swans where the poet heard “the fierce rush of wings / When they flew upward, beating the water to foam, / Climbing with visible triumph up the wild sky” (CP, 3.446). In “After Lake Leman” the poet recalls the swans on that Swiss lake “Rising together, beating the dawn-blue water with webs and wings flying up and flying high . . . their beating wings high in heaven” (CP, 3:461). As in Yeats, Jeffers’s image of wild swans suggests not only imaginative flight but also the image of timeless beauty, which even their tumultuous era could not change. Imaginative and actual communities and characters appear in multiple works such as Yeats’s Red Hanrahan, Mary Hines, and Raftery and Jeffers’s Tamar and Reverend Barclay. “Drunken Charlie” (1941) is a lyric written in the voice of a character who appeared first in the long narrative Give Your Heart to the Hawks (1933). Jeffers’s mystic Onorio Vasquez appears in several poems, most notably The Loving Shepherdess (1926), as Yeats’s Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne appear in “The Phases of the Moon” but also in “He Bids His Beloved Be at Peace,” “He Remembers Forgotten Beauty,”5 “The Lover Asks Forgiveness Because of His Many Moods,” “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes, “Michael Robartes and the Dancer,” and “Owen Aherne and His Dancers.” For Robert Zaller, Jeffers, like Yeats, had a lifelong fascination with occult phenomena and

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Robinson Jeffers, W. B. Yeats, and Ecoprophecy

peopled “his narratives with religious primitives, seers who traffic in a world of portents and voices, spirits and döppelgangers.” At the apex are mad visionaries who talk to God like Cassandra in The Tower beyond Tragedy (Zaller, Cliffs, 109). Edna Lou Walton (“On the Theme of Time,” 95) and Robert Zaller have also identified the obsession with time that characterized both Yeats and Jeffers. Like Nietzsche, who conveyed the personal through archetypal passions incarnated by individuals and the historic through the ebb and flow of great civilizations (Zaller, “Spheral Eternity,” 260), they viewed time as cyclical recurrence and assimilated historic and cosmic process by describing their recurring pattern. Having embraced theories of historical cycles, and thus liberated their poetry from the confines of the modern, Yeats and Jeffers adopted the personae of prophets. Yeats’s well-known prose work A Vision (1925, 1937) and such poems as “The Phases of the Moon” (1918) combine imaginative and personal experience with history as defined in cycles or phases. Both Jeffers and Yeats were carvers of stone and of language that they might create permanence though they knew all structures to be temporal: stone and mortar provided images and symbols that enabled them to create the poetry of myth and timelessness. David Young has argued in Troubled Mirror: A Study of Yeats’s “The Tower” that Thoor Ballylee represented not only loftiness but also solitude, loneliness, isolation, intellect, point of view, and meaning both immediate and personal (37). Both make their houses emblems of themselves and history and imagine what will happen to their towers when they die (Yeats, “To Be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee”; Jeffers, “Tor House”). They chose places where they could create a new, modern literary tradition made universal from folk traditions and myth but also where they could create new myths. Yeats restored that he might find “Befitting emblems of adversity” for his “bodily heirs” (“My House,” 1923, CW 1:202). Jeffers built that he might create emblems of tradition (“To the Stone-Cutters,” 1924; “To the Rock That Will Be a Cornerstone of the House,” 1924; “Tor House,” 1928). Their towers were not retreats but places to start from in the quest to form bodies of work that resisted the modern world.

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2. Landscape and the Self Although W. B. Yeats never met Robinson Jeffers, the two poets barely missed meeting one another several times. Yeats visited California in 1919 on a lecture tour to raise money for Thoor Ballylee’s new roof; during the journey he received messages through his wife’s automatic writing from ghostly “instructors,” leading to the creation of A Vision. Meanwhile Jeffers was building Tor House in Carmel. The Jefferses visited Thoor Ballylee in 1929, 1937, and 1948. Una wrote that during the 1929 visit she and Robin visited the tower twice; Yeats was there the first time, but she made no mention of meeting or seeing him (Collected Letters, 836). In August, when the Jefferses returned to Thoor Ballylee, Yeats was not there. From Yeats’s example Una Jeffers conceived the notion of her husband’s building a tower in imitation of Thoor Ballylee. Yeats bought the eleventhcentury Norman tower in 1917 and restored it over several years; Jeffers helped to build Tor House in 1919, and during the following decades he built Hawk Tower. Gilbert Allen suggested that both poets tried to make their houses ade­ quate symbols: “Yeats renovates, in order to reaffirm what strikes him as most admirable within the cultural past; Jeffers builds, in order to express in cultural terms a geological history that human beings habitually ignore” (61–62). The interesting similarity of their choosing towers as dwelling places informs their creation of the symbolism of landscape; their treatment of what is now called bioregion is unique in Modernist poetry and places them in the tradition of what is now referred to as ecopoetics. Like Yeats, Jeffers found it necessary to place his poetry in a specific landscape, and in doing so he challenged one of the fundamentals of Modernism. According to Charles Altieri, the two related modes of Romanticism— Wordsworth’s “immanentist” and Coleridge’s “symbolist”—helped to generate Modernism, and most Modernists chose the symbolist mode with its allegiance

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Landscape and the Self

to the “creative mind as the source of value” (Enlarging the Temple, 29). Robert Zaller pointed out that Robinson Jeffers rejected the Modernist credo of the primacy of art, denying that it could possess independent or transcendent value; he embraced the idea that artistic beauty could be derived only from nature (“Robinson Jeffers,” 36). As Jeffers made clear in “Love the Wild Swan,” he believed that art holds a place secondary to that of nature. While his long narratives testify to his extensive knowledge of the classics, it is clear that he valued history, society, and culture through their relationship to the natural world. He certainly rejected the Modernist tendency to interpret nature exclusively through human perception, as Wallace Stevens did in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” where the setting exists only as the speaker perceives it through his artistic sensibility. For Jeffers poetry does not create the significance of place, as does, for example, the work of Stevens, Robert Frost, or William Carlos Williams; for Jeffers, place creates significance for poetry, and while he created narratives with extraordinary characters and described the culture and traditions of the place he wrote about, he always valued the land itself more than any human construct. Max Oelschlaeger affirmed Jeffers as a “regionalist alternative” to culturally prevailing conceptions of poetry (246). Jeffers followed what Jonathan Bate called Wordsworth’s tradition of the spiritualized place and the poet as conscious namer of the sacred places (Romantic Ecology, 87–88). More a poet of the Lake District than of England (85), Wordsworth showed that the soul draws nourishment from the way it abides in a location (92). Yeats, whose work more closely follows Coleridge’s symbolist mode, nevertheless found it necessary to ground his poetry in Irish landscape and tradition. Explaining his artistic choice in nationalistic terms, he wrote in 1888: “You can no more have the greater poetry without a nation than religion without symbols. One can only reach out to the universe with a gloved hand—that glove is one’s nation, the only thing one knows even a little of . . .” (Letters to the New Island, 103–4); and in 1890 he added: “The first thing needful if an Irish literature more elaborate and intense than our fine but primitive ballads and novels is to come into being is that readers and writers alike should really know the imaginative periods of Irish history” (Letters to the New Island, 174). In order to create this “elaborate and intense” Irish literature, Yeats knew that he needed to infuse his writing with a sense of place, the land from which the Irish ballads and mythologies had sprung. While embracing the symbolist mode of Romantic poetry, he nevertheless insisted that art be informed by place and tradition. Here again, Jeffers found his poetic mentor in Yeats. William Nolte claimed that both attempted “with unmatched success in this century . . . to give to their own locale an infinitely translatable meaning” (“Robinson Jeffers as Didactic Poet,” 218). Critics have noted that Jeffers without Carmel is as “unimaginable

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as Frost without New England” (Porter, “Robinson Jeffers and the Poetry of the End,” 27), and that Jeffers furthermore cannot be identified with California merely but almost entirely with the Big Sur coast (27)—not the tropical south, the fertile valley of Steinbeck’s writings, the wine country of Jack London, the Sierra Nevada, or the Cascades to the north. Similarly, although Yeats placed many poems in different locations in Ireland (such as Dublin in “Easter, 1916” and “To a Shade,” the rock of Cashel [Tipperary] in “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes,” and Wicklow in “Stream and Sun at Glendalough”), when the poetic speaker identifies with place, it is inevitably Sligo (as in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “The Mountain Tomb,” “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland,” “The Hosting of the Sidhe,” “To an Isle in the Water,” “The Fiddler of Dooney,” and “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz”) or Galway (as in “In the Seven Woods,” “Coole Park, 1929,” “Coole and Ballylee, 1931,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation,” “At Galway Races,” “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” introductory verses to The Shadowy Waters, and “The Tower” and the poems following it in The Tower). Yeats’s and Jeffers’s landscapes remain far more important to their aesthetic than the New England landscape does to Frost’s. Jeffers, unlike Frost, took his theme from place, celebrating the land but at the same time making clear that the poem does not stand in the place of it; the poem is separate, and the landscape is the greater of the two. While Frost is associated with the New England landscape and Williams with Paterson, New Jersey, for example, they did not identify themselves with it, saying in effect, “I know what I know because of the traditions associated with these places.” Frost did not attempt to make his own persona synonymous with New England nor did Williams with New Jersey, Eliot with England, or Stevens with New Haven or Florida. Yeats and Jeffers on the other hand steeped their poetry in the history, culture, mythology, and politics of the places they wrote about. When they went outside their own locations, other landscapes comment not on themselves but on Ireland in Yeats’s case and Big Sur in Jeffers’s. In “The Wild Swans at Coole” Yeats’s speaker laments the passing of time and his separation from the natural world; while any landscape would be an appropriate setting for such a theme, Yeats chose not only Ireland but a specific place in Ireland to develop his vision. For Yeats the greatness of art stemmed from the richness of cultural tradition inevitably associated with place. Landscape figures hugely in his aesthetic, and it is noteworthy that although Yeats lived a great deal of time during his earlier years in London, not one of his poems is located there. He spent many winters in Rapallo, but none of his poems deals with its surroundings, history, or people. Similarly four extended visits to the United States produced no poems set there. While readers may insist that Yeats recreated the Irish countryside (and people) to suit his own idea of what Irish literature and the Irish nation

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should have become, it is nevertheless clear that the landscape and its people inspired him in ways that no other setting could have done, his work taking much of its character from landscape and natural history. Poetry and landscape are involved in a dialectic: natural features provide memorable images that in turn bring the landscape into focus for the reader; and not merely landscape but the terrain with its animals, plants, and village life dependent on them make the national art what it is. Thus Yeats’s work should be included in any consideration of ecopoetics. Ireland became a protagonist of sorts in Yeats’s work as a whole, not only as landscape but also as a nation emerging from a past full of linguistic and political domination, gaining a sense of ethnic and historical nationhood. In an introduction written for the never-published Dublin edition of his poems (later titled “A General Introduction for My Work,” 1937), Yeats articulated the internal conflict of the colonial subject whose indigenous language was superseded by the colonial tongue: no people, Lecky said at the opening of his Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, have undergone greater persecution [than the Irish], nor did that persecution altogether cease up to our own day. No people hate as we do in whom that past is always alive; there are moments when hatred poisons my life and I accuse myself of effeminacy because I have not given it adequate expression. It is not enough to have put it into the mouth of a rambling peasant poet. Then I remind myself that, though mine is the first English marriage I know of in the direct line, all my family names are English and that I owe my soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake, perhaps to William Morris, and to the English language in which I think, speak and write, that everything I love has come to me through English; my hatred tortures me with love, my love with hate. (CW, 5:210–11) Thus deprived of a national language (but not of his mother tongue), lamenting his own fate as a writer in a colonial nation, and determined to revivify a sense of Irish nationhood, he felt the necessity of creating a literature firmly imbued with the sense of place. In “The Celtic Element in Literature” he wrote that the Irish poets’ “natural magic” (CW, 4:130) stems in part from their ancient worship of nature and that beautiful natural places were visited by spirits: Men who lived in a world where anything might flow and change, and become any other thing; and among great gods whose passions were in the flaming sunset, and in the thunder and the thunder-shower, had not our thoughts of weight and measure. They worshipped nature and the abundance of nature, and had always, as it seems, for a supreme ritual that tumultuous dance among the hills or in the depths of the woods, where

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unearthly ecstasy fell upon the dancers, until they seemed the gods or the godlike beasts, and felt their souls overtopping the moon; and, as some think, imagined for the first time in the world the blessed country of the gods and of the happy dead. They had imaginative passions because they did not live within our own strait limits, and were nearer to ancient chaos, every man’s desire, and had immortal models about them. (CW, 4:132) The development of a vigorous folklore and mythology could not be separated from the land. Although he could commend the beauty of the Irish landscape, Edmund Spenser was unable to write with any understanding of the land or its people, for his mind always turned toward the court of Elizabeth (“Edmund Spenser,” CW, 4:260); had Morris and Shelley used landscapes of their own they would have given to modern poetry the stability of ancient poetry (qtd. in Frawley, Irish Pastoral, 68). Oona Frawley, who considered The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) to be among the earliest modern poetic expressions of nature and landscape (61), wrote that Yeats created an anticolonial, politicized pastoral pitted against London, that Yeats’s poetry asserts a new nation by insisting on place (59–60): “In Irish folklore the entrance to the otherworld is found in the actual, physical landscape; for Yeats, place and nature similarly become entries into another world of Ireland that he longed for—a world that he associated with his Sligo childhood—and that, in his early poetry, is itself otherworldly because so idealized” (60).1 Irish legend, which might give the new century its most memorable symbols, moved among woods and seas known to the people, Yeats wrote in “The Celtic Element in Literature” (CW, 4:138). He believed all beautiful places to be haunted (130); in his Memoirs he explained, “I was convinced that all lonely and lovely places were crowded with invisible beings and that it would be possible to communicate with them” (124). Frawley noted that Yeats, increasingly interested after 1890 in resurrecting the Irish past, represented the natural world as a driving force (72) with “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1890) among the first of his poems to specify place (66). While the cabin and bean rows may be Thoreauvian—pastoral living being a political act—the other images are all Yeatsian; Irish monastic or hermit poems, for example, imagined a similarly Edenic future (67).2 Edward Said further asserted the primacy of the geographical in anti-imperialist imagination (“Yeats and Decolonization,” 69). “I believed that instead of thinking of Judea as holy we should [think] our own land holy, and most holy where most beautiful,” Yeats wrote in his Memoirs (123–24), and he identified a person’s holy place as the location that person knows as a child, where he or she first crept upon the floor (“The Holy Places,” CW, 4:215). Writing of V. S. Soloviev’s notion of “the spiritualized soil,” Yeats meditated that his notion of “soil” is all that the soul is concerned with—home,

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family, place, habit—and he called up the image of a wayside well in Ireland carefully tended by the farmer on whose land it sat (“If I Were Four-and-Twenty,” CW, 5:41). In his essay “Art and Ideas” (1913), Yeats expressed his desire to find “symbolic language reaching far into the past and associated with familiar names and conspicuous hills” and lamented the richness lost to Shelley because he had not discovered his Caucasus in England or Ireland (Essays & Introductions, 349–50). In “Four Years: 1887–1891” Yeats explained his desire to create a new Promethean character of Oisin or Finn and to use Cro-Patrick or Ben Bulben as a backdrop (CW, 3:166–67). Tim Wenzell noted the importance of forests and sacred groves, many of which were destroyed by colonization (“Ecocriticism, Early Irish Nature Writing, and the Irish Landscape Today,” 129). According to Robert Pogue Harrison, many place names were derived from the presence of forests and stories connected with them, so when forests were cut down the culture was destroyed as well (Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, ix)—deforestation entailing not only loss of ecosystems but also cultural memory, myth, and symbol. Yeats demonstrated his knowledge of the traditional importance of certain trees to ancient Irish culture, for example, when he had Crazy Jane insist: “Bring me to the blasted oak” (“Crazy Jane and the Bishop,” CW, 1:255) in order to declare her love for Jack the Journeyman, the oak being one of the most revered (“Ireland’s Lost Glory,” Birds and All Nature, qtd. in Wenzell, 129). Knowing that birch trees were associated with love, Yeats made Jane compare one with her lover: “But a birch-tree stood my Jack” (CW, 1:256). Aware of folklore that connected hazel trees with wisdom, druids, and seers, Yeats had the speaker in “The Song of Wandering Aengus” first seek out the hazel wood and then use a hazel wand to catch the silver trout that transforms itself into a faery woman who leads Aen­ gus to wander in search of her all his life. In “He Thinks of His Past Greatness when a Part of the Constellations of Heaven,” the speaker has been a hazel tree where stars are hung; Yeats’s note informs readers that the “hazel tree was the Irish tree of Life or of Knowledge, and in Ireland it was doubtless, as elsewhere, the tree of the heavens” (Variorum Poems, 177). According to Natalie Crohn Schmitt, “The earth itself, in Irish mythology and in Yeats’s later work, is sacred” (“‘Haunted by Places’: Landscape in Three Plays by W. B. Yeats,” 342), and she pointed to the careful descriptions of actual landscapes in The Cat and the Moon, At the Hawk’s Well, and The Dreaming of the Bones. The last is set in the neighborhood of the ruined Cistercian Abbey of Corcomroe in County Clare, a rocky peninsula overlooking the Atlantic. Liam Miller wrote that the ruins of the abbey suggest the “dreaming back” into historic past with which the play is concerned: a character called only Young Man, who has been involved in the Rising of 1916, runs to the west, where he will be helped

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to escape the police searching for him (Noble Drama of W. B. Yeats, 237). On this barren foreground, in a setting made realistic by the language of the play, he meets the ghosts of Diarmuid and Dervorgilla, who first brought the Normans to Ireland. They ask for forgiveness after seven hundred years, but the Young Man refuses and makes his escape. What is important is that Yeats set the stage in a real place as indicated by the names of the abbey and the towns nearby— Muckanish, Finvara, Aughanish, Bailevelehan, and Aughtmana—and the places in the distance—Aran Islands, Connemara hills, and Galway. Even more specific is the detailed evocation of landscape with the narrow land, unroofed church, rocky Burren, and notably the shallow well and flat stone (Schmitt, 351). As Schmitt noted, “All but five of Yeats’s twenty-four plays are clearly set in Ireland” (357). In each of the three plays mentioned in her article, “the characters travel, with guidance, to a holy place in the landscape where past and present, natural and supernatural meet” (356). The ghosts in The Dreaming of the Bones come from the abbey to the tomb of Donogh O’Brien (who shares the stigma of having called in a foreign army), a location far from the places most touched by the English from whom the Young Man is fleeing and close to a community of peasants (353). According to Terence Diggory, Yeats’s regionalism encouraged several American poets, most notably Robinson Jeffers, to write their poetry of place (Yeats and American Poetry, 124). Certainly the land became Jeffers’s major theme, beginning in 1924 with Tamar. In “The Place for No Story” (1930–31), land possesses almost sentient preeminence: No imaginable Human presence here could do anything But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion. (CP, 2:157) The poem describes the hills with their “scant pasture,” a rock “shaped like flame,” the cows grazing, the ocean beneath, and the air above “haunted with hawks” as if they were spirits. The landscape itself is paramount: “This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen.” While describing the Pacific coast, “Gray Weather” (1935) becomes a metaphor of landscape and the human. Watching the sea, Jeffers’s persona suspends emotion and is able to explore more deeply the perfect beauty of wave and rock: It is true that, older than man and ages to outlast him, the Pacific surf Still cheerfully pounds the worn granite drum; ... The stormy conditions of time and change are all abrogated, the essential Violences of survival, pleasure,

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Love, wrath, and pain, and the curious desire of knowing, all perfectly suspended. In the cloudy light, in the timeless quietness, One explores deeper than the nerves or heart of nature, the womb or soul, To the bone, the careless white bone, the excellence. (CP, 2:485) Looking at the Big Sur coast and knowing it will endure far longer than human beings, the poet understands that he is part of nature, that his human consciousness—although enabling him to love natural beauty—need not separate him from it. The literary treatment of the landscape of a nation engenders questions about the distance between observer and observed. In The Country and the City Raymond Williams emphasized the idea of objectivity, which he believed to be fundamental to Romantic pastoralism and to nature writing in general; moreover, Williams added, writing about landscape implies separation of self from the land (120). Just as an observer of landscape must view it from a vantage point removed from the scene in order to appreciate it, the writer about landscape must achieve aesthetic distance from the subject in order to capture its beauty. Such distance necessarily implies objectivity, raising the question of how much of Yeats’s and Jeffers’s relationships to the land were owing to the idealism that independence from subsistence allows. Jeffers did not engage in the life of ranching he praised so highly, and Yeats never lived the life of the peasants, fishermen, hermits, or farmers with whom he peopled his poems. As W. J. T. Mitchell pointed out in “Imperial Landscape,” landscape changes the way people see as well as what they see. The word landscape employed as a verb means to use the land in order to create a way of looking at the world— to shape ideas, attitudes, and perceptions. As adjective it means re-creation of the world around us. Mitchell called landscape painting, a recent and decidedly Western form of art, a “pseudohistorical myth” in which “the discourse of landscape is a crucial means for enlisting ‘Nature’ in the legitimation of modernity, the claim that ‘we moderns’ are somehow different from and essentially superior to everything that preceded us, free of superstition and convention, masters of a unified, natural language epitomized by landscape painting” (13). Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory presents an alternative view of the interaction between nature and civilization, asserting that “neither the frontiers between the wild and the cultivated, nor those that lie between the past and the present, are so easily fixed” as was Thoreau’s conviction that civilization sought to bring all nature under control, to make it “meek and compliant”: “Whether we scramble the slopes or ramble the woods, our Western sensibilities carry a bulging

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backpack of myth and recollection” (Schama, 574). Landscape may therefore be used in the same way by poets to create artistic power. Although it was Jeffers’s purpose to describe landscape apart from human consciousness and to emphasize his belief in separation of the land itself from the anthropocentric vision of it, nevertheless there can be no doubt that the Big Sur coast and its human as well as geologic history empowered Jeffers not only to create but also to sustain his poetic vision. He engaged in landscaping even in the building of Hawk Tower, finding his artistic power by identifying himself with his region and transforming it to his own aesthetic. According to James Karman, “Within the limits imposed by the lyric form, others wrote beautiful poems about nature, but no one else devoted himself or herself to bringing an entire landscape to life in verse” (“Life and Work,” 132), and Karman credited Jeffers with helping in part to inspire the modern environmental movement. Location in fact enabled both Jeffers and Yeats to achieve their poetic purpose, but their poetry also in part creates the place they write about, for themselves and for the generations who succeeded them. One noteworthy similarity between the two poets is Yeats’s and Jeffers’s identifying themselves with the mountainous, rocky western coasts of their countries. Because the rocky soil restricted agriculture, both locations afforded poor livings for many of their inhabitants; yet they were at the same time scenic and endowed with folk history and local culture. Both western coasts had the added advantage (for purposes of poetry) of being far from the political centers of the east and hence emblematic of the ideal state, closer to the primitive and natural. Yeats and Jeffers munificently described their coastal regions’ rocky slopes and forests as well as the animals, both tame and wild, that inhabit them. Few poets have had as keen an eye for bird life, partly because of the abundance of habitat that coastal regions afford: Jeffers’s poetry names herons, pelicans, eagles, swans, grebes, gulls, sea parrots, vultures, sparrows, cormorants, and of course hawks. The poem “Birds” names sparrow hawks, seagulls, falcons, and hawks because “a poem / Needs multitude, multitudes of thoughts, all fierce, all flesh-eaters . . .” (CP, 1:108). He implied that the poem lives only because of the physical world. Yeats also chose symbols from the natural world because without it a national poetry cannot exist. Nation, rather than nature, may be his ultimate concern, but nation and place are inextricable. Yeats’s bird symbols include moorhens, cranes (herons), linnets, stares (starlings), jackdaws, and especially swans. In addition both poets described the native inhabitants of their regions—not from an anthropologist’s perspective perhaps but the poet’s view of those who live on and earn their living from the land; for Jeffers, these were small farmers and ranchers of Big Sur, while for Yeats they were large landowners, small farmers, tinkers, and beggars, especially of the western counties.

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As Frank Kinahan pointed out, Yeats’s “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland” (CW, 1: 143–45) is a veritable map of Sligo, the man’s experience taking place in the here and now and yet also within the timelessness of faery lore. Lissadell, Toberscanavin (shortened to “Scanavin” in the poem), and Lugnagall are in Sligo, and Dromahair is immediately across the border in Leitrim (Yeats, Folklore, and Occultism, 66). Lissadell House, the home of Yeats’s friends the Gore-Booths, is named for the barony of Lissadell in County Sligo. The well of Scanavin is in County Sligo as is Lugnan Gall, “The Hollow of Foreigners,” a townland in Glencar Valley in County Sligo. The dreamer, caught up in his desire for the beauty and timelessness of fairyland, nevertheless has a good life: he is successful in love and commerce, and his fiery personality is celebrated as “a country tale” (CW, 1:43). Just as he achieves his success, however, the faery enter his life in the form of something common—fish, lugworms, knotgrass, worms—in each stanza something lowlier than the last. The man achieves no happiness because he has been “glammoured”—his soul paralyzed by the imagined beauty of fairyland, which he is never allowed to enter (Kinahan, 71). Placing the supernatural in familiar, “real” locations demonstrates how closely knit were the supernatural and natural worlds, at least in Yeats’s poetic context. In “The Wild Swans at Coole” (1917) the speaker identifies himself with the place, notes exactly the number of years (nineteen) he has been visiting the lake and gazing on the swans, and even counts them as if the loss of a single one would bring some misfortune. He asks among what rushes they will build— where they will be—when he “awakes” as if from slumber to find them gone (CW, 1:131–32). A poet may locate romantic allegory in any traditional, beautiful, or natural scene, but Yeats chose Galway and the estate of his friend Lady Gregory in order to place the image in the land that held the greatest significance for him. Creating literature for Ireland involved more than recalling the old legends and making them known to all classes in Ireland. It involved the poetic re-creation of Ireland itself, which transcends the establishment of a merely political nation (introduction, CW, 5:209). Jeffers also used the same image of wild swans in “Love the Wild Swan” (1935), stating that he hated his verses for not being as beautiful as the natural world: 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 color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things. (CP, 2:410) Calling it “The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings,” the poet/persona declares that better poets than he have missed the mark and failed

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to realize their imaginative vision. This failure, however, does not subvert the fact that nature deserves supreme allegiance. At least, he concludes, love your eyes that can see the majesty of nature: “Love the wild swan.” In Yeats’s poem “Under the October twilight the water / Mirrors a still sky,” and the sound of the swans’ wings is “clamorous,” whereas with Jeffers it is “storm.” Jeffers’s poem seems in fact to speak to Yeats, to “mirror” Yeats’s poem while at the same time rejecting Yeats’s use of the swans as emblem for the passing of Romanticism and youth. Jeffers wanted to celebrate natural beauty exclusively, to undermine the value of any human construct; yet in the end he was unable to do so. The poem, which could never capture in human language the beauty of nature, became the only conduit for his expression. In spite of what may be regarded as Jeffers’s quarrel with Yeats’s symbolism, it is not difficult to find in Yeats’s aesthetic a sensibility for nature not far from Jeffers’s. Lady Gregory’s estate contained not only the wild swan lake but also seven woods, which Yeats carefully named in several poems, such as “In the Seven Woods” and “To a Squirrel at Kyle-na-no,” in order to establish not only tradition but tradition associated with place. The introductory verses to The Shadowy Waters (1906) name all seven woods and the source of their distinctiveness: Shan-walla, where a willow-bordered pond Gathers the wild duck from the winter dawn; Shady Kyle-dortha; sunnier Kyle-na-no, Where many hundred squirrels are as happy As though they had been hidden by green boughs Where old age cannot find them: Pairc-na-lee, Where hazel and ash and privet blind the paths; Dim Pairc-na-carraig, where the wild bees fling Their sudden fragrances on the green air; Dim Pairc-na-tarav, where enchanted eyes Have seen immortal, mild, proud shadows walk; Dim Inchy Wood, that hides badger and fox And marten-cat, and borders that old wood Wise Biddy Early called the wicked wood: Seven odours, seven murmurs, seven woods. (CW, 1:405) Although the poet had not “enchanted eyes” he dreamed that “beings happier than men” moved in the shadows, and at night his dreams “were cloven by voices and by fires,” and the images of the Shadowy Waters (“the images I have woven in this story / of Forgael and Dectora”) moved round him in those voices and fires. The persona asks, apostrophizing either the woods or waters that become the shadowy images with which he peoples the poem,

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How shall I name you, immortal, mild, proud shadows? I only know that all we know comes from you, And that you come from Eden on flying feet. (405) Thus, “all we know comes from you”—from woods, water, and the spirits that dwell there: all he knows comes from the earth and the traditions associated with place. Both Jeffers and Yeats, moreover, created themselves as protagonists in their own poetry and placed themselves in the landscape. The earth was at the center of Jeffers’s aesthetic, while the realization of a new Ireland created from the old traditions remained at the center of Yeats’s. In order to become its own tradition, the self required a heroic dimension, Terrence Diggory argued (122), and it was Yeats’s tower that finally allowed him to explore fully the consequences of the tradition of the self. Although he had been incorporating autobiographical detail into his poetry for at least a decade, for the most part he could not express the self as fully as the tower—which was both chosen and created—enabled him to do. The tower offered poetic authority, a seemingly traditional source but actually a new one (122), which allowed Yeats to claim spiritual ancestors. While Yeats adopted both personal and impersonal roles (the personal in “The Tower,” among others; the impersonal in works such as “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland”), Jeffers decided, as Yeats had, that the personal role was the one that best defended against the modern world. In conceiving of himself as a tradition, however, Jeffers preserved an impersonal aesthetic: “Tradition, as a dimension of the self, is a larger-than-life dimension such as Jeffers had sought to incorporate in the characters of his narratives and plays. As in his early lyrics, Jeffers is still playing a role, presenting a self that has been made, not born . . . a role based on his own life . . .” (Diggory, 132). For Yeats, the poetic individual must be created: “he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been re-born as an idea, something intended, complete” (introduction, CW, 5:204). In order to find a tradition for himself, he restored Thoor Ballylee and created a history for it out of both fact and legend, enabling himself to achieve poetic power. This proved to be true for Jeffers as well. As Diggory remarked, “It is appropriate that Jeffers’s first intimation of that role and his final recognition of it both involve the building of his house and tower, a symbolic act that can be traced directly to Yeats” (132). From their respective towers, both mythos and emblem, Jeffers and Yeats projected themselves and their imaginative beings onto the landscape, creating poetic roles and personae. It is useful here to note George Bornstein’s description of the three-part structure of the Romantic landscape poem: in the first part the speaker stands in a state of detachment from the landscape; in the second he interacts with nature

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through some image or memory that changes place or time; in the final part he returns to the present with some new insight or understanding (“Yeats and Romanticism,” 29). “The Tower” can be read as such a landscape poem. According to Thomas R. Whitaker, in “pacing on the battlements he [Yeats] has already stepped into the past” and stares upon objects that suggest the source of historical and natural continuity; a person may visit the past only when he stands in firm relationship to a specific locale (Swan and Shadow, 166). Yeats introduced the reader to his great philosophical poem with a bitter lament about the conflict between old age (“caricature”) and the heightened imaginative power achieved by the thing that derides him, his age. As in Bornstein’s traditional landscape poem, the second section changes the focus when the speaker sends his “imagination forth” among the landscape and cottages calling “Images and memories / From ruin or from ancient trees”—culture and nature—in order to question them: the landowning Mrs. French who seems to have wielded autocratic power; Mary Hynes, the peasant girl and legendary beauty; and Red Hanrahan himself, a character from Yeats’s stories who is patterned on the hedge schoolmaster a teacher who instructed the children of peasants Owen Rua O’Sullivan. In his comprehensive study of the poem and its contexts, Troubled Mirror: A Study of Yeats’s “The Tower,” David Young wrote that this section of the poem moves from present landscape to local history to local folklore to his own creation, Hanrahan (22). The last section resolutely articulates the details of Yeats’s final artistic will. The landscape signifies the place where all this happens, where memory and present time coincide, where the tradition he created continues. Yeats wrote to Sturge Moore about the cover for “The Tower”: “All my art theories depend upon just this—rooting of mythology in the earth” (qtd. in Bornstein, Material Modernism, 65). The poet/persona devotes three stanzas to a local beauty, her “blind rambling celebrant,” and the creation of poetry. He compares blind Raftery, the poet who created the song about Mary Hynes, with Homer and Mary with Helen of Troy: Strange, but the man who made the song was blind; Yet, now I have considered it, I find That nothing strange; the tragedy began With Homer that was a blind man, And Helen has all living hearts betrayed. (195–96) He thus links the Irish and Greek folktales and hence the literature and traditions of Ireland with those of ancient Greece. The characters imagined from the top of the tower are not only described in their landscape but speak from it. In the next section the poet reminds readers of his own mythology:

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And I myself created Hanrahan And drove him drunk or sober through the dawn From somewhere in the neighbouring cottages. (196) It is significant for Yeats that his character emerges from among “the neighboring cottages”; that is, near the tower, in Yeats’s immediate and imagined landscape. Hanrahan is a figure of the hedge schoolmaster and wandering poet of eighteenth-century Ireland—a person inseparable from his homeland. Yeats thus established his own myth from the folklore of the place. The ancient master of the house and his rough men-at-arms, who once billeted in the tower and whose ghosts, playing with great wooden dice, disturb the current sleepers, are types whose “images” are stored in the Great Memory just as are the farmers and beautiful peasant girl. Yeats wanted to question them about old age and love— death and desire—and he needed their “mighty memories,” the relationship to history and the land.3 The poet/persona finds his own answer, creating an ancestry and tradition for himself, writing his will (both testament and personal resolve) and leaving not material but spiritual possessions—the pride of the Anglo-Irish and the faith of the poet who rejects philosophy for art, declaring that “Death and life were not / Till man made up the whole, / Made lock, stock, and barrel / Out of his bitter soul” (CW, 1:198). Between the stanzas on art and action, however, his gaze is distracted from the landscape to the jackdaw nest in the loophole, where the noisy birds “drop twigs layer upon layer” (199) as the speaker has created his poem word by word and as others before him have created civilization, myth, and culture. The focus here is on building, creating, and nurturing. The first ten lines—one stanza—of the short poem “My House,” section 2 of “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” which follows “The Tower,” constitute a long sentence fragment teeming with visual and auditory description of the landscape surrounding the house, followed by two lines in which the speaker turns to the interior and the poet’s personal possessions, the candle and the page on which he has written. According to David Young, “The tower has become a kind of bastion of the imagination in ‘My House’” (34). The third and final stanza declares that two solitary men founded this tower—a warrior, that he might loyally guard the land for someone who has forgotten him, and a poet, that his heirs may find “emblems of adversity” to inspire them in their loneliness. The fourth section of that poem returns to the theme of lineage, which obsessed Yeats in this book and in The Winding Stair, and the poet figure asks what will happen if his descendants lose the imaginative power he has found. The answer is that the tower will become a “roofless ruin” that stands nevertheless as monument to the poet, his wife, and his friend Lady Gregory.

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Jeffers too was concerned with lineage and the legacy of personal freedom from the corruption of civilization in “Shine, Perishing Republic” (1920). In “To the House” (1920) he used Yeatsian diction to describe the construction of Tor House from stones that were “bones of the old mother,” the earth, but “Baptized from that abysmal font  / The sea” (CP, 1:5). The second line of the short lyric employs the phrase “host of the air,” the title of a Yeats poem about the Sidhe, but here referring to the sea wind. “Heaping,” used in line 1, echoes Yeats’s use of “heaped” or “heap,” found twenty-four times in the collected poetry (Parrish, Concordance). Jeffers’s image of sea waves as horses (“ocean cavalry that are maned with snow” [CP, 1:5]) may have been borrowed from or influenced by the image in Yeats’s “Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea” (1892), in which the hero wages battle with the waves, deluded by a spell into thinking they are horsemen. In “The Stare’s Nest by My Window” (part 6 of “Meditations in Time of Civil War”), Yeats offered evidence that the tower will one day lie in ruin: “bees build in the crevices / Of loosening masonry,” and the mother birds bring insects to feed their young (CW, 1:204). The exhortation to the bees to build in the empty house of the stare may reflect desperation, anticipation, or invitation, but clearly the poet agonizes because not only civilization but his own creative work is coming apart. “My wall is loosening,” the poet laments; yet certainly the decay of the tower and civilization produces greatness in imagination. Creation brings destruction, which engenders creation: “Bees are an ancient symbol of creativity and spirituality, of swarming souls, as their honey is an ancient symbol of wisdom, but each of the poet’s summons to them issues from an increasing concern about the circumstances of civil war” (Young, 38–39). One might consider here the metaphor of loosening masonry that symbolizes the fall of civilization in Jeffers’s poem “A Little Scraping” (1933), which asserts that scraping the walls of a dishonest contractor’s concrete “Through a shower of chips and sand makes freedom.” The mountain and seacoast, which reach “far out into past and future” are what is real, even as civilization crumbles, inspiring creation: God is “the beautiful power / That piles up cities for the poem of their fall” (CP, 2:282). The work of art stems not from the creation of a civilization but from its decline, for that is what engenders the introspection necessary for inspiration. As Yeats in “The Tower” (1926) paced “under the day’s declining beam” upon the battlements and called forth images, Jeffers from the top of Hawk Tower imagined the story of an unfortunate local man named Margrave: On the small marble-paved platform On the turret on the head of the tower Watching the night deepen

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... I lean on the broad worn stones of the parapet-top. . . . (“Margrave,” 1930, CP, 2:160) No clearer allusion to Yeats exists in Jeffers’s work. Jeffers’s poem spends no time lamenting mortality and death; rather this poem, like many others, treats it as release from pain. Like Yeats in late afternoon, Jeffers’s speaker watches “the night deepen” and feels “the rock-edge of the continent.” Lights glow to the east, where civilization lies in fear of darkness, but the ocean to the west obscures the stars. After meditating on the vastness of the cosmos and the pathetic fate of human beings, the speaker calls to mind the tragic fate of young Margrave, who murdered for money to finish his medical studies and excused his action because he believed himself, who may have been able to save a great many people, superior to those around him. The senselessness of Margrave’s life leads the speaker to address the stars again later in the poem and to tell them to flee outward, away from humankind’s contagion. Not faith and pride but self-loathing dominate the speaker’s thoughts because he too has begotten children and “humanized the ancient sea-sculptured cliff / And the ocean’s wreckage of rock / Into a house and tower” (CP, 2:167). Yet the “enormous beauty of the world” must dream its bad dreams of humankind. The speaker—“On the little stone-belted platform / On the turret on the head of the tower, / Between the stars and the earth / And the ocean and the continent”—looks out again and sees a ship’s light and, mirrored in a pool in the river mouth, a star that hangs over Margrave’s farmhouse. Every natural thing seems to reflect human tragedy, and he concludes the story with Margrave’s father’s sorrow and young men senselessly shooting sea lions to keep them from devouring fish the men want to catch. In the final section, the speaker has stood on the stone platform watching the passing of stars that will also perish, “Scattering themselves and shining their substance away / Like a passionate thought.” Unlike human life, however, the cosmos “is very well ordered” (171). Just as Yeats’s tower is filled with the noise of jackdaws, wings of starlings, and hum of honeybees, Jeffers’s house in “Winged Rock” (1932) lives because of the wild creatures making their home there. While the “flesh” of the house is “heavy sea-orphaned stone,” the house possesses imagination in the “little clay kits” the swallows build in the eaves, as “bright wings flash and return, the heavy rock walls commercing / With harbors of the far hills and the high / Rills of water, the river-meadow and the sea cloud” (CP, 2:131). The red, white, and marbled pigeons “beat the blue air over the pinewood and back again” in addition to the killdeer nest hidden in a bush against the west wall, the many finches, gulls, and the “sudden attentive passages of hawks” that give the house its life. The house lives, but not because of its human inhabitants.

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Yeats further examined the interrelationship of place and tradition in the related poems of The Winding Stair, “Coole Park, 1929” and “Coole and Ballylee, 1931.” Part of Yeats’s ethic of the land included the country house together with its landscape and the values it represented. In the first section of Dramatis Personae (1935), Yeats described in elegant detail the three great demesnes of Coole House, Tulira Castle, and Roxborough House, which lay within two hours’ walk of each other and seemed to him unchanging in their antiquity (CW, 3:289–90). Certainly it is an indoor landscape that Yeats described in “Coole Park, 1929,” although he was careful also to describe the western landscape amid trees and wildlife, “A sycamore and lime tree lost in night / Although that western cloud is luminous” (CW, 1:242). The poem celebrates Coole Park because of its notable visitors, who have ensured the sacredness of the place even when they and the house are gone: When all those rooms and passages are gone, When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound And saplings root among the broken stone. (243) Thus the speaker envisions a future when traveler, scholar, and poet will visit the place and calls on them to dedicate “A moment’s memory to that laurelled head.” The writing of the poem itself creates the tradition that Yeats labored assiduously to invent—one of nobility, art, and history in order to inform and enrich the culture. “Coole and Ballylee, 1931” poetically links the two locations in Galway. It may be spurious geology, but Yeats’s poem declares that the stream joins estate and tower, running beside Thoor Ballylee, then underground, and finally to Coole, darkening through ‘dark’ Raftery’s ‘cellar’ drop, Run underground, rise in a rocky place In Coole demesne, and there to finish up Spread to a lake and drop into a hole. (CW, 1:243–44) The places are connected by the lives lived there: a solitary poet who seeks to establish tradition in his dwelling place and a playwright and essayist who brought talented people together to create the Irish Literary Theatre. The stream itself connects not only the two places, which are imbued with history, but also the two artists because for Yeats culture is rooted in place. Ironically Yeats borrowed from British aristocratic values in establishing his poetic tradition. The importance of the Pollexfens’ Sligo estate, the Gore-Booths’ Lissadell, and Lady Gregory’s Coole Park issues from the idea of noble householder-landowners who are generous, courteous, faithful, and responsible, who preside over estates that are both beautiful and bountiful. The poem belongs to the tradition of

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estate poems such as Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst,” one of the first—and certainly one of the most influential—landscape poems, which itself affirms—perhaps even creates—the ideal it describes. To this tradition Yeats added the necessity of artistic patronage.4 History for Jeffers on the other hand is natural history, of which the experience of individuals and cultures is a mere part. Jeffers envisioned the future as “one piece with the past” (CP, 1:105) in “Granite and Cypress” (1924) as well as in “Tor House” (1926), in which he wrote that the visitor after “a handful of lifetimes” (CP, 1:408) might find a few trees on the foundations of “sea-worn granite,” but after ten thousand years all that remained would be the “granite knoll on the granite / And lava tongue in the midst of the bay.” At the same time, Jeffers imagined the future in which his Tor House and Hawk Tower have fallen as Yeats envisioned the future in which Coole Park’s house is “broken stone” (CW, 1:243). What will last, Jeffers said, is the planted forest of eucalyptus or coast cypress, “haggard / With storm-drift.” All that will endure into the millennia will be rock and water. Even the names will be erased. The traveler who visits after ten thousand years will find no foundation, only the . . . granite knoll on the granite And lava tongue in the midst of the bay, by the mouth of the Carmel River-valley, these four will remain In the change of names. (CP, 1:408) Passing time, which brings with it destruction of human creation, is not to be lamented; Jeffers celebrated the natural processes and geologic permanence—rock, river valley, and water itself. Distinguished by fierce and solitary beauty, Point Joe is elevated to almost mythical status: “Walk there all day you shall see nothing that will not make part of a poem” (“Point Joe,” CP, 1:90). The point has teeth (rocks) that have torn ships in the fog. Jeffers described every detail carefully—the debris of shipwreck, desolate sea meadows that are riotous with flowers, wind-beaten pines beyond them, and the golden light beating upward. One other person walked there, a Chinese man who gathered seaweed and spread it on the rocks to dry. Jeffers declared that Permanent things are what is needful in a poem, things temporally Of great dimension, things continually renewed or always present ... Fashionable and momentary things we need not see nor speak of. (CP, 1:90) Grass that renews itself annually is as great as the mountains; moreover, the man “gleaning food between the solemn presences of land and ocean” is as significant

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as the mountain in past and future for he engages, like Yeats’s fisherman (“The Fisherman,” 1916), in one of the timeless activities of human beings. Separated by one poem—“Gale in April,” a song to the harsh beauty of nature—“Point Joe” and “Point Pinos and Point Lobos” both praise the beauty and permanence of nature and tradition, but the second poem identifies the presence of God in nature. Jeffers carefully located the poem named for two places sacred to him: A lighthouse and a graveyard and gaunt pines Not old, no tree lives long here, where the northwind Has forgot mercy. All night the light blinks north, The Santa Cruz mountain redwoods hate its flashing, The night of the huge western water takes it, The long rays drown a little off shore, hopelessly Attempting distance, hardly entering the ocean. The lighthouse, and the gaunt boughs of the pines, The carved gray stones, and the people of the graves. (CP, 1:92) The poem, a philosophical meditation on the nature of God, is divided into three sections, the first describing the tortured Christ—the dying god who struggles still to redeem people—and section 2 contemplating the legacy of Buddha. This long meditation represents a variant of the traditional landscape poem: in section 1 the speaker adopts the state of detachment and begins the two-part discourse on the founders of religious faith; the second recalls the European landscape of the speaker’s childhood together with the often warlike history of those places. The final stanza in this section, however, returns to place, even alluding to Jeffers’s own creation, the girl Tamar, whose narrative is included in the same volume: The evening opens Enormous wings out of the west, the sad red splendid light beats upward These granite gorges, the wind-battered cypress trees blacken above them, The divine image of my dream smiles his immortal peace, commanding This old sea-garden, crumble of granite and old buttressed cypress trunks, And the burnt place where that wild girl whose soul was fire died with her house. (CP, 1:97) Finally the third section returns to the present, chastising both great teachers and religious founders, Buddha and Christ, “One striving to overthrow his

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ordinances through love and the other crafty-eyed to escape them  / Through patient wisdom . . .” (CP, 1:97). The poet banishes both love and wisdom as human constructs and views both rocky points (Pinos and Lobos) as the real entities to be worshipped. Although these great teachers—Christ and Buddha—are wiser than other human beings, they are still more foolish than the “running grass” that “fades in season and springs up in season.” God is not made manifest through love or wisdom: For the essence and the end Of his labor is beauty, for goodness and evil are two things and still variant, but the quality of life as of death and of light As of darkness is one, one beauty, the rhythm of that Wheel, and who can behold it is happy and will praise it to the people. (CP, 1:98) God is manifest in nature’s beauty, however fierce and violent it appears. In the series of sixteen poems called “Descent to the Dead” (1931), inspired by a long trip with his family to Britain and Ireland in 19295, Jeffers created a spiritual association with the Irish landscape. The poet descends like Odysseus or Orpheus to the underworld, but in this case the speaker views the land of his ancestors as a promontory from which to understand the passing of cultural ages within the panorama of geological ages. Britain and Ireland, with their many ruins and stone circles, provide the metaphor for a living place with many reminders of its long, bloody history. The initial poem, “Shane O’Neill’s Cairn,” serves as introduction to the series with its nihilistic theme of the meaninglessness of human life, the landscape of death, and the earth bearing witness to tumultuous history. The subdued tone, Jeffers wrote in his notes (CP, 2:130), reflects the writer’s mood: the series forms an extended elegy for humankind and for the Old World. “Oisin’s Grave” compares the coasts of Antrim and Carmel and his own death with that of the hero, linking both coasts metaphorically and lamenting the discrepancy between the mythic past and the present as does Yeats’s longest narrative poem The Wanderings of Oisin (1889). Instead of a dialogue between Saint Patrick and warrior-hero as in Yeats’s poem, however, Jeffers’s imagined dialogue occurs between descendant and what he believes the ancient warrior would have replied and traces the spiritual journey of a person returning to the land of his ancestors. Jeffers’s speaker is ambivalent about his return: And I a foreigner, one who has come to the country of the dead Before I was called, To eat the bitter dust of my ancestors. (CP, 2:109) The poet of California, unable to feel the same sense of living tradition that Yeats did, identifies himself with the dead who were his ethnic forebears and declares that if he were envious it would be Oisin’s fame he envied, “not caged in a poem,”

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but “a glory untroubled with works, a name in the north / Like a mountain in the mist . . .” (CP, 2:108), reminiscent of the speaker’s envy of the soldier in “The Road at My Door,” section 5 of “Meditations in Time of Civil War.” Even so, the speaker makes “a remembered name” although his death and burial in California will lack the splendor of Oisin’s monument. Recalling the spirits of dead heroes he declares, Oh but we lived splendidly In the brief light of day Who now twist in our graves and names Shane O’Neill, Hugh McQuillan, and the “Connaught queen in her mountain summit” (Maeve). Yeats’s hero in The Wanderings of Oisin passes “the cairn-heaped grassy hill  / Where passionate Maeve is stony-still,” referencing Knocknarea Mountain south of Sligo (CW, 1:355). The next stanza of Jeffers’s poem states that the heroes lived more fully than contemporary people can: We dead have our peculiar pleasures, of not Doing, of not feeling, of not being. Enough has been felt, enough done, Oh and surely Enough of humanity has been. We lie under stones Or drift through the endless northern twilights And draw over our pale survivors the net of our dream. (CP, 1:109) Described as “survivors” rather than “descendants”—those barely alive rather than those who carry tradition in themselves—all the later lives are “less / Substantial” than even one of the heroes’ deaths: . . . they cut turf Or stoop in the steep Short furrows, or drive the red carts, like weeds waving Under the glass of water in a locked bay, Which neither the wind nor the wave nor their own will Moves; where they seem to awake It is only to madden in their dog-days for memories of dreams That lost all meaning many centuries ago. (CP, 1:109–10) The speaker then repeats his refrain, “Oh but we lived splendidly / In the brief light of day,” Oisin hunting on the mountains or drinking with princes, Jeffers living “on the western cliff / In the rages of the sun” (CP, 2:110). Oisin lies “grandly” under stones, but Jeffers eats “bitter bread with the dust of dead men” in a country grown weak with too much humanity, described in the masculinist language for which Jeffers is so often criticized:

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In a uterine country, soft And wet and worn out, like an old womb That I have returned to, being dead. (CP, 1:110) The speaker nevertheless insists in that final section that he and the ancient heroes lived “splendidly” and that the mountains—Tievebuilleagh, Trostan, Lurigethan, and Aura—are alive, and that a few of the dead live “A life as inhuman and cold as those.” Jeffers followed “Oisin’s Grave” with “The Low Sky,” a poem of four tetrameter tercets, each containing one unrhymed line followed by a couplet. The speaker compares the cloudy sky of Ireland with the lid of a tomb and concludes that because the clouds are low and the earth old, he can lie down in its tomblike space and allow his mind to dissolve and his flesh to fall to the ground. As he compared dead Oisin with life in death, Jeffers’s life in Ireland seemed to encompass death in life as the self dissolves into earth. For the speaker, “mind” and “imagination” seem “burdensome,” and he wishes his consciousness to dissolve. The poem is not morbid but rather anticipates the philosophy that Jeffers worked out through his poetry of becoming one with the true beauty—the cosmos. In “The Broadstone,” “The Giant’s Ring,” and “In the Hill at Newgrange,” Jeffers visited the ancient monuments and questioned their meaning. In “The Broadstone” all discords (antinomies) are perfectly resolved, and the speaker finds final harmony as if time were nothing in the waves of heather and bells, “bee-bright,” as in “The Tower” where the bees represent the creative mind seeking wisdom. The giant dolmen “towers” in its “high solitude” (CP, 2:112) and “abides as if time were nothing”—and it is nothing when people contemplate the geological eras rather than the narrow scope of their lives. The wide moor “breaks upon many stones” like waves of the sea or waves of time. The poem may allude to Yeats’s “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes” (1919), in which his fictitious character stands upon Cashel Rock on the fifteenth day after the full moon and calls up the spirits of a female sphinx (mystery and intellect), a Buddha (love and wisdom), and between them a girl dancing (body). Contemplation of those three brings cessation of thought (“Mind moved yet seemed to stop”), which enables the speaker to transcend the temporal for a moment: “In contemplation had those three so wrought / Upon a moment, and so stretched it out / That they, time overthrown, / Were dead yet flesh and bone” (CW, 1:172). Gazing at the monument called “The Giant’s Ring” near Ballylesson, Belfast, the speaker of Jeffers’s poem first declares that anyone capable of pursuing immortality through heroic deeds or monuments will do so, all the while “Secretly mocking” his insanity, for he knows the paradox that “immortality is for the dead” and no fame endures forever. Jesus and Caesar “built their memorials”

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from human weakness, while Washington constructed his from strength—the alignment remains mysterious—but the “nameless chief,” who led “forgotten tribes in the Irish darkness” employed simpler and “faithfuller” materials— stone—to create his “diadem” on the top of a hill “That sees the long loughs and the Mourne Mountains, with a ring of enormous embankment, and to build / In the centre that great toad of a dolmen  / Piled up of ponderous basalt that sheds the centuries like rain-drops” (CP, 2:113). Time again means nothing. This monument has lasted four thousand years, more than Homer’s or Shakespeare’s names will endure, and like Oisin the nameless chief ’s “presence is here, thickbodied and brutish.” The speaker then issues an imperative either to the reader or to himself: the lesson of this stone monument is that “secular like Christian immortality’s / Too cheap a bargain: the name, the work or the soul: glass beads are the trade for savages” (CP, 2:113) like the “Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird” that Plato and Aristotle have become in Yeats’s “Among School Children” (CW, 1:217). “In the Hill at Newgrange” is a dramatic dialogue between the immigrant speaker and an old king who remembers all the history of the place like someone tapping into the Great Memory of the world. Awakened by the foreigner, the old king warns him that Danes took all his golden bracelets, but the speaker declares that the king has better treasure—“The peace of the dead” of which no one can rob him. The old king then tells him about the stone age hunters in the north (“chippers of flint”) but the speaker again assures him those men died thousands of years earlier. Like ghosts, more characters enter. Mary Byrne, who loved dead Shane O’Neill, dead four hundred years, now meets and murders a lover on O’Neill’s tomb while her peasant husband lies in a drunken sleep. A short middle stanza describes the changes to the landscape over a few hundred years: Great upright stones higher than the height of a man are our walls, Huge overlapping stones are the summer clouds in our sky. The hill of boulders is heaped over all. Each hundred years One of the enormous stones will move an inch in the dark. Each double century one of the oaks on the crown of the mound Above us breaks in a wind, an oak or an ash grows (CP, 2:115). The king then sees the fires from the round towers of the Christian monasteries, but the speaker repeats that they have been dead for thousands of years. More recently a peasant woman starved on Achill Island,6 and later the speaker imagines a priest in Donegal who, having lost his faith, spits on the cross. Unable to understand the later, unheroic culture, the king remembers Cuchulain, “one of the spitfire princes, then bold watch-dog of the Ulster border,” who was dead when another warrior-king, Bruce, was killed in battle. Millennia later a rich

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merchant built his house on a hill in Dundalk, site of a battle, and trembles because “The young men of Ireland are passionate again,” and he worries about his wealth being stolen or looted in an insurrection. The speaker concludes “time to have done / With vision”; what matters is the earth and the revolving cycle of history that the geological ages are witness to. Similarly “Antrim” asserts that all battles for land are meaningless, that all things come to death in the end, but no matter how much agony people suffer, their descendants renew the struggle, the “agony of resurrection” (CP, 2:118). “No Resurrection” answers “Antrim” in that to return like Oisin after long ages would be to find old human affections hollowed. In “Delusions of Saints” the speaker addresses the dead priests of the ruined monastic communities of Clonmacnoise, Cong, Glendalough, Monasterboice, and Kilmacduagh, telling them they are safe from apostasy, derisive laughter, or the ruin of the churches and round towers that for them were monuments of their faith. In “Iona: The Graves of the Kings” the speaker fears that the rocky soil has too many memories while “Shooting Season” describes gentlemen hunting grouse in Scotland, where a cairn “names an old battle” (CP, 2:122) and gray rocks mark the graves of clans. Identifying with the dead who “handled weapons and hunted in earnest,” the speaker reflects that it is better to be dust than live the pitiful life now progressing above them. “Ghosts in England” is not concerned with dead heroes but more common people whose vision of history is no less fatalistic. The “Great past and declining present are a pitiful burden  / For living men” but not for the dead who have “aged out of humanity” and stare impassively at the hollow limestone, “not caring but seeing, inhuman as the wind” (CP, 2:123). Throughout the “island of ghosts,” dead Arthur, Alfred, Picts, Welsh, and villagers “seemed merry, and to feel / No pity for the great pillar of empire settling to a fall, the pride and the power slowly dissolving” (CP, 2:124). In “Inscription for a Gravestone” the speaker is not dead but “inhuman” and describes Jeffers’s wish to become part of the beauty of nature, undressing himself of “laughable prides and infirmities” like “an athlete / Stripping for the race” (CP, 2:125). The cosmos which knows no good or evil, pleasure or pain, sets him free. Although he admired the beauty while alive, now he is “part of the beauty,” wandering the air. This poem is followed by “Shakespeare’s Grave,” in which the speaker asks why the great poet cared about his grave and concludes that he wanted “quietness,” having tasted more of life (the “whirling circles”) than most men. “The Dead to Clemenceau: November 1929” is a dramatic monologue in which a soldier killed in the war addresses the French prime minister who negotiated the Treaty of Versailles and then lived to be ninety; neither his long life nor the many changes his country went through holds any meaning for the soldier or for Clemenceau. The last poem in the series, “Subjected Earth,” addresses all the previous poems. This verse opens with the speaker walking the “flat Oxfordshire fields”

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and finding nothing to contemplate but a scene almost Yeatsian in description, “a flight of lapwings / Whirled in the hollow of the field, and half tame pheasants / Cried from the trees” (CP, 2:128). Briefly remembering his own landscape, “the long bronze mountains of my own coast,” he then returns to the “soft alien twilight” that makes him think of the descent of all humanity to oblivion, yet even as he concludes that the Old World is sliding toward its end, the realization of the greatness of the earth wakes him from his reverie: “the great memory of that unhumanized world, / With all its wave of good and evil to climb yet, / Its exorbitant power to match, its heartless passion to equal, / And all its music to make, beats on the grave-mound” (CP, 2:129). In “An Irish Headland” (1932), which is not part of “Descent to the Dead” but seems as if it ought to be the final poem in that series, the speaker recalls the massacre of Rathlin and the old war chief McDonnel, who could not prevent the violence. The man’s anguish and anger were nothing, the speaker declares, even during the battle (“the moment of blood and smoke”) compared to “the somber passion of the headland” (CP, 2:172). Describing the events that took place there, Jeffers’s persona concludes the poem as he does when he sees the California coast, which cries out for tragedy “like all beautiful places” (“Apology for Bad Dreams,” CP, 1:208–11). The violence so long ago in Ireland he declares to be “nothing; not a gannet-feather’s / Weight on the rock; the mood of this black basalt has never turned since it cooled” (CP, 2:172). In the next stanza he recalls the tragedy of Drogheda: The most beautiful woman Of the northern world made landfall under this cliff when she came to the bitter end that makes the life shine, But the black towers of the rock were more beautiful than Deirdre. Weep for the pity of lovers and the beauty of bereaved men, the beauty of earth is too great to weep for. (CP, 2:172) The headland has outlasted love, war, passion, and sacrifice, for it is greater than anything human and is all that can uplift speaker or hearer. Another poem from Jeffers’s experience in Ireland, which appears much later than “Descent to the Dead,” is called “Now Returned Home” (1938) and tells about his and his wife’s taking a steamer to Barra in the Inner Hebrides and meeting a young woman holding a two-week-old baby, the son of her sister who died in childbirth in Glasgow. The young woman descends to a curragh, in which a young man and an old man row her to the “wee island” where they live, determined to protect the little life amid the harsh environment and evidence of violent history: “the bleak island, gray stones, ruined castle,  / A few gaunt houses under the high and comfortless mountain” (CP, 2:606). The image of

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simple nobility—which also lasts millennia—against the forbidding but magnificent landscape lingers in the speaker’s mind, now that he has also returned home, more than any image of busy London or New York. Robinson Jeffers will not be remembered primarily for the poems in “Descent to the Dead,” but they are important because they are his only sustained series of verses set in a landscape other than Big Sur. Although the overall tone may seem harshly critical of the older culture, the landscape allowed Jeffers to examine the intersection of life and death in a place rich in history and personal meaning even as other Irish landscapes (Sligo and Galway) enabled Yeats to create a new literary tradition for Ireland. Both realized their artistic aims and established their poetic identities by creating a poetry of place. At the same time, their choosing their dwelling places as emblems of those landscapes enabled them to delve more fully into the consequences of writing.

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3. “Two curves in the air”­— Prophecy and Eternal Recurrence Modernism presupposes the fading of the traditional and the familiar, and many Modernists believed they were the last to know civilization as they had experienced it. Wisely or unwisely, Jeffers, like Yeats, investigated the poetic implications of the notion of the “cleansing apocalypse” that would reverse the cultural cycle and set it on a new course. Although much of value would be destroyed, they believed the forces of violence would also unleash new creative impulses. While Jeffers’s belief that civilization and the human species were doomed found its basis in his knowledge of science and history, Yeats’s notion that all civilizations would pass away—probably violently—came primarily from his studies in cultural and literary history. Influenced by Shelley’s conception of the poet as seer and prophet, Yeats and Jeffers adopted the role and wrote poetry of prophecy through which they employ the imagery of myth, time, and historical cycles. As Louis L. Martz observed in Many Gods and Many Voices: The Role of the Prophet in English and American Modernism, the voice of the prophet rises from disaster or the threat of it, at the same time observing and absorbing “the physical world and its people, while affirming a sustaining power derived from the awareness of some transcendent presence” (8). Whitman the prophetic poet, for example, desired to bind all Americans “by the power of his voice” (7). Jeffers explicitly declared himself to be a prophet when he identified with the doomed Greek woman in “Cassandra.” As Robert Zaller indicated, Jeffers also emphasized the abyss of self-deception that awaits any seer (Cliffs of Solitude, 130), prophecy not necessarily being a gift to be desired:

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The mad girl with the staring eyes and long white fingers Hooked in the stones of the wall, The storm-wrack hair and the screeching mouth: does it matter, Cassandra, Whether the people believe Your bitter fountain? Truly men hate the truth; they’d liefer Meet a tiger on the road. Therefore the poets honey their truth with lying; but religionVenders and political men Pour from the barrel, new lies on the old, and are praised for kindly Wisdom. Poor bitch, be wise. No: you’ll still mumble in a corner a crust of truth, to men And gods disgusting.—You and I, Cassandra. (CP, 3:121) Yeats and Jeffers embraced the notion that civilizations follow natural cycles of ascent and decline as do days, years, and even geological epochs. In A Vision Yeats laid out his theory of eternal recurrence for individuals as well as cultures while Jeffers founded his belief in eternal recurrence of what he called “cultureages” in the natural cycles he observed—the tidal ebb and flow, the wearing away of the seacoast, the seasons, and the changing earth. Cassandra the prophet in The Tower beyond Tragedy tells of coming empires that will rise and fall: there remains A mightier to be cursed and a higher for malediction When America has eaten Europe and takes tribute of Asia. . . . (CP, 1:148) Even the titles At the Fall of an Age (1931) and At the Birth of an Age (1934) presuppose the inevitability of cultural ascent and decline. Jeffers placed the latter in the book called Solstice, which, as Arthur B. Coffin pointed out in Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Inhumanism, is concerned with the solstice of a civilization (141). Although the dramatic poem The Bowl of Blood (1940) may owe its theory of cyclical ascent and decline of civilization partially to Nietzsche via Oswald Spengler (Coffin, 71), Jeffers had formulated his own theory before he read their philosophies. In “Themes in My Poems” (1941) he explained his interest in “culture-ages” and the source of his theories: The idea of culture-ages—culture-cycles—the patterned rise and decline of one civilization after another—is a common-place now, nearly as common-place as death or war, but it held my thought and has been a frequent subject of my verses—“The Fall of an Age,” “The Birth of an Age,”

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and so forth. The idea was popularized by Oswald Spengler’s book, “Decline of the West”; but it came to me much earlier, from my own thoughts, and then I found it formulated by the English Egyptologist, Flinders Petrie, in a little volume called “The Revolutions of Civilization,” first published in 1911. Of course it was developed long before that, notably by Vico of Naples, Giovanni Battista Vico, who published his book in 1725. And there is a passage in Plutarch’s “Life of Sulla,” referring to the Etruscan acceptance of this idea, which I versified in one of several pieces called “The Broken Balance.” (CP, 4:409–10) Coffin—who investigated the influence on Jeffers of the theories of history of Vico, Petrie, Havelock Ellis, Spengler, and most of all Nietzsche—explained that Vico’s teaching was based on cyclical patterns called ricorsi: each period in the history of a nation resembled similar times in other nations, and from such similarities it was possible to discover the courses all nations would take (193). Because with each “return” civilization progressed, Vico’s conception of history is spiral rather than cyclical. Petrie also believed cultural change to be spiral, not circular, and the history of society progressive. He put forth his findings that in seven thousand to two thousand years of Egyptian history there were eight successive periods of civilization, each separated by ages of what Petrie called barbarism (Coffin, 207). Ellis, who corresponded with Jeffers and was a follower of Spengler and Nietzsche, described in The New Spirit (1890) his belief in the cyclical movement of history (Coffin, 212). In The Dance of Life (1923) Ellis made clear that he too subscribed to the idea that “Man has proceeded, not in a straight line, but in a spiral” (qtd. in Coffin, 212). Jeffers found his own theories reinforced by these philosophers; while he believed cyclical “culture-ages” to be inevitable, however, he did not believe them to be ultimately progressive. Just as Jeffers came to these ideas independently, Yeats too found his own ideas buttressed by thinkers who investigated theories of recurrence. He knew Ellis well (Gould, 238n108), had heard of Vico, and had read Petrie and Spengler. In a passage from A Vision he stated that when the automatic script that engendered the book began, he had not known of anyone who “had tried to explain history philosophically” (261). Afterward he learned of Henry Adams’s essays and Petrie’s Revolutions of Civilization, in which Yeats found much of the historical interpretation that he himself had written. Even more revealingly, Yeats noted his excitement on reading the 1926 English edition of Spengler: “I found there a correspondence too great for coincidence between most of his essential dates and those I had received [from the “instructors”] before the publication of his first German edition” (A Vision, 261). Yeats went on to cite (incorrectly) Vico as Spengler’s main source and to declare that “half the revolutionary thoughts of Europe are a perversion of Vico’s philosophy” (A Vision, 261).1

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In his informative discussion of the influence of Spengler on Yeats’s poems and A Vision, Edward Callan quoted a June 26, 1926, letter to Sturge Moore in which Yeats used Spengler as an example for his belief that minds did not function entirely separately: Here is a very strange thing which will show you what I meant when I wrote of individual men not being shut up in a bottle. I published a few weeks ago a book called A Vision. In that there is a summing up of European history which I divide into certain epochs. I have just got Spengler’s Decline of the West. I was writing my notes and drawing my historical figures in Galway while his first edition was passing through the press in Germany. I have never heard his name and yet the epochs are the same, the dates are the same, the theory is the same. (Qtd. in Callan, “W. B. Yeats’s Learned Theban: Oswald Spengler,” 596) Callan notes that Yeats regarded The Decline of the West as a sacred book not only because of Spengler’s knowledge of the arts but because of specific correspondences between Spengler’s theories and Yeats’s philosophy as laid out in A Vision. Callan also traced the Spenglerian influence on “Sailing to Byzantium,” “The Long-Legged Fly,” and “The Gyres” among other major works (594, 600– 601). Spengler rejected the notion of progress embraced by Vico, Petrie, and Ellis and embodied in nineteenth-century progressivist ideas. He explained his intention (and revealed the cultural chauvinism of his time) in the introduction to book 1: “In this book is attempted for the first time the venture of predetermining history, of following the still untraveled stages in the destiny of a Culture, and specifically of the only Culture of our time and in our planet which is actually in the phase of fulfillment—the West European-American” (3). Spengler explained his methodology in terms Yeats found acceptable; moreover, Spengler’s skepticism about “facts” as well as the vocabulary in which he expresses his belief in historical cycles sounds remarkably Yeatsian: It still remains to consider the relation of a morphology of worldhistory to Philosophy. All genuine historical work is philosophy, unless it is mere ant-industry. But the operations of the systematic philosopher are subject to constant and serious error through his assuming the permanence of his results. He overlooks the fact that every thought lives in a historical world and is therefore involved in the common destiny of mortality. He supposes that higher thought possesses an everlasting and unalterable objectiveness (Gegenstand), that the great questions of all epochs are identical, and that therefore they are capable in the last analysis of unique answers (41).

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Historical cycles revolve not only because of deep-seated impulses in the human psyche but also in the natural world: For, in the historical as in the natural world-picture, there is found nothing, however small, that does not embody in itself the entire sum of fundamental tendencies. And thus the original theme came to be immensely widened. . . . Thereafter I saw the present—the approaching World-War— in a quite other light. It was no longer a momentary constellation of casual facts due to national sentiments, personal influences, or economic tendencies endowed with an appearance of unity and necessity by some historian’s scheme of political or social cause-and-effect, but the type of a historical change of phase occurring within a great historical organism of definable compass at the point preordained for it hundreds of years ago. The mark of the great crisis is its innumerable passionate questionings and probings. (47–48) Every event and personality, whether seemingly of great historical significance or infinitesimal inconsequence, embodies all other phenomena as well as the forces of change in the past or the future; the phases are part of an organism—a living thing called human history—whose characteristics may be defined or predicted, but never impeded. Spengler added that culture is “the prime phenomenon of all past and future world-history” (105). Thus these forces of change come not from historical impulses external to human culture (as we may suspect from his term “preordained”) but from within it. In addition Spengler confirmed the importance Yeats placed on myth and folk belief as dominants of all civilizations: Consider the decline of art and the failing authority of science; the grave problems arising out of the victory of the megalopolis over the countryside. . . . Consider at the same time one fact taken from what is apparently an entirely different field, the voluminous work that was being done in the domain of folk-psychology on the origins of myths, arts, religions and thought—and done, moreover, no longer from an ideal but from a strictly morphological standpoint. It is my belief that every one of these questions was really aimed in the same direction as every other, viz., towards that one Riddle of History that had never yet emerged with sufficient distinctness in the human consciousness. The tasks before men were not, as sup­ posed, infinitely numerous–they were one and the same task. Everyone had an inkling that this was so, but no one from his own narrow standpoint had seen the single and comprehensive solution. And yet it had been in the air since Nietzsche, and Nietzsche himself had gripped all the decisive problems although, being a romantic, he had not dared to look strict reality in the face. (48)

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Spengler’s identification of the renewed interest in the study of folklore parallels Yeats’s statements in “Four Years: 1887–1891” (published in 1922) that making the nation’s folk tales—always familiar to the uneducated people—known to the educated ones would “so deepen the political passion of the nation that all . . . would accept a common design . . . these images, once created and associated with river and mountain, might move of themselves and with some powerful, even turbulent, life” (CW, 3:167). In the preface to the revised edition of book 1 of The Decline of the West, Spengler stated that his sources were not scientific but literary and philosophical: he found his method, he said, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and his “questioning faculty” in Nietzsche (xiv). Both Jeffers and Yeats read and were influenced by Nietzsche’s philosophy of eternal recurrence and the Übermensch, but my focus is on the former idea. In 1902 Yeats referred to Nietzsche as “that strong enchanter” (Letters, 379). He had discovered Nietzsche when Havelock Ellis wrote three articles for the Savoy (1902) on the German philosopher (Gould, Joachim of Fiore, 232, 238). Yeats understood the implications of the prophecy of eternal recurrence in the third part of Thus Spake Zarathustra, where the prophet sees a vision of a gateway that is the meeting place of two contradictory paths that continue forever, for they represent past and future eternities. Even this gateway has appeared before to other prophets who conceived of eternal recurrence, for all things, all actions, all beings who have been will exist again. Time is a perpetual “wheel of existence,” Zarathustra teaches (266): “all things eternally return, and ourselves with them, and we have already existed times without number, and all things with us,” his animals say to him (270). He prophesies the “great year of Becoming,” which must turn the hourglass of history over again and again so that all things may run their course continually. Ages resulted from two contradictory artistic impulses, the disciplined and the anarchic, which Yeats called “primary” and “antithetical.” He conceived of history as a great wheel of twelve cycles, similar to Zarathustra’s eternal wheel of being. Each age of Yeats’s great wheel unwound the thread another age had wound, and in this way the cycles of history alternated between opposing forces. In 1934 Yeats described the manifestation of his theory on contemporary times: “Our civilization was about to reverse itself, or some new civilization about to be born from all that our age had rejected, from all that my stories symbolised as a harlot, and take after its mother; because we had worshiped a single god it would worship many or receive from Joachim de Flora’s Holy Spirit a multitudinous influx” (VPl, 932). In A Vision the grand plan was the two-thousand-year alternating cycles of history.2 Michael Allen Gillespie called the doctrine of eternal recurrence the central thesis of Nietzsche’s thought (141–42), while Lawrence J. Hatab stated that eternal recurrence reflects Nietzsche’s basic philosophical task, namely the

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affirmation of the world as it is, refusing any sense of resolution, deliverance, or progress (93). Certainly Nietzsche rejoiced in the fact of recurrence, the completeness of the cosmos, the infinite: “My consolation is that everything that has been is eternal: the sea will cast it up again” (The Will to Power, 548). He found scientific as well as philosophical evidence for the theory: “The law of the conservation of energy demands eternal recurrence” (547): If the world had a goal, it must have been reached. If there were for it some unintended final state, this also must have been reached. If it were in any way capable of a pausing and becoming fixed, of “being,” if in the whole course of its becoming it possessed even for a moment this capability of “being,” then all becoming would long since have come to an end, along with all thinking, all “spirit.” The fact of “spiriti” as a form of becoming proves that the world has no goal, no final state, and is incapable of being. (546) He concluded in The Will to Power that, if the world could reach a state of equilibrium, that state would have been reached already. Every possible combination of states (which Nietzsche called “quantity of force” and “centers of force”) would at some time be realized an infinite number of times (549). “And since between every combination and its next recurrence all other possible combinations would have to take place,” Nietzsche reasoned, “and each of these combinations conditions the entire sequence of combinations in the same series, a circular movement of absolutely identical series is demonstrated: the world as a circular movement that has already repeated itself infinitely often and plays its game in infinitum” (549). Like Yeats, Jeffers also found that Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence reinforced his own philosophy. Throughout his poetic career, Jeffers described the natural processes he loved. For him the wearing away of the granite seacoast, the recurring waves, forest fires, and changing seasons became metaphors for eternal recurrence—the fall of nations, civilizations, eras, and eventually of all humankind. The subject of the changing cycles of nature and civilization was one of Jeffers’s major themes throughout his career, and prophetic elements were regular in Jeffers’s verse after “The Broken Balance” (1928). In the 1930s he began to develop what Robert Zaller called a “prophetic mode” with poems becoming “increasingly hortatory and didactic” (The Cliffs of Solitude, 211), climaxing with Be Angry at the Sun (1941) and The Double Axe (1948). Jeffers commented on great religious figures and their civilizations in “Meditation on Saviors” (1928) and “Theory of Truth” (1938)—and in a series of poems from “The Broken Balance” (1928) to “Prescription of Painful Ends” (1941)—on the cyclical nature of historic experience and impending decline of the West. He combined historic

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time with cosmic process by describing the patterns of history and the ebb and flow of civilizations: “How beautiful . . . are these risings And fallings: the waves of the sea, the Athenian empire The civilization of Europe, the might of America. . . .” (CP, 3:294) In “I Shall Laugh Purely” (1941) he wrote that he would enact a play that represents not “the world’s end / But only the fall of a civilization” (CP, 3:31) while “Hellenistics” (1937) looks beyond the period of great wars Jeffers saw immediately ahead to a new age of barbarism. One of Jeffers’s artistic purposes throughout his career was to warn or at least remind his collective readership that all civilizations are doomed, that dying out and being supplanted are part of the natural cycles of civilization as well as nature. The poem “Hands” (1928), which draws its central image from archeological history in order to articulate this belief, describes a cave painting in a canyon—pictures of human hands painted on a vault of rock. No one knows, the speaker says, whether the prehistoric creators intended religion, magic, or art, but these “careful / Signs-manual” send a further unintended message from a completed cycle of civilization to the people of one that is not yet completed: Look: we also were human; we had hands, not paws. All hail You people with the cleverer hands, our supplanters In the beautiful country; enjoy her a season, her beauty, and come down And be supplanted; for you also are human. (CP, 2:4) Those who see these paintings should be reluctant to feel sanguine about their civilization’s resilience because history as well as prehistory confirms that societies and nations, no matter how powerful, are impermanent. In “What Are Cities For?” (1935) Jeffers described the earth’s memory of passing civilizations: The earth has covered Sicilian Syracuse, there asphodel grows, As golden-rod will over New York. What tragic labors, passions, oppressions, cruelties and courage Reared the great city. Nothing remains But stones and a memory haunting the fields of returning asphodel. You have seen through the trick to the beauty; If we all saw through it, the trick would hardly entice us and the earth Be the poorer by many beautiful agonies. (CP, 2:418) The antecedent for the italicized you is unidentified; it may be the earth itself the speaker addresses or perhaps the author’s own poetic persona. In “The

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Purse-Seine” (1937), after gazing at the shining city, beautiful and yet terrible because its “vast populations” had become “incapable of free survival,” he concludes that all cultures will decay (CP, 2:517). The speaker does not lament the demise of civilizations but rather muses that the great suffering that has gone into their creation and destruction makes them beautiful as the natural processes are beautiful. Jeffers did not relish individual suffering but took philosophical comfort in the fact that a new civilization will be born for every one that decays. Just as whole civilizations fall, so will individual nations. In many poems, of which “Shine, Perishing Republic” (published in 1925, prior to the English translation of Spengler in 1926) may be the best known, Jeffers foretold the fall of the United States as a world power and its disintegration as a nation, as Athens, Sparta, Rome, Syracuse, and all other great civilizations and nations fell and were supplanted. Jeffers made clear that he favored the inevitable destruction of civilization and of his country in particular, not because he did not love it but because the nation had abandoned its founding ideals. America is declining because it has lost its hardness, sparseness, and sense of itself as a republic, having settled into “the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire” (CP, 1:15). Protest—what we have always claimed to respect—is so short-lived that it is “a bubble in the molten mass,” which “pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens” like lava. Then the poet recalls that all living things fall and decay, making compost for new growth: “the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth,” and decaying civilizations will prepare the way for new ones. As in “Descent to the Dead,” in which the speaker declares that the old cultures also flamed for an instant and produced beautiful tragedy, in “Shine, Perishing Republic,” the country is a “mortal splendor”—a short-lived luminary. Meteors, however, are not needed less than mountains even if they do not last so long; similarly the country will shine brilliantly for an instant before it dissolves. Yet he cautions that “for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center.” Corruption coexists with politics and civilization. “The Cycle” (1925), which precedes “Shine, Perishing Republic” in the Collected Poems, describes the cycles of historical civilizations and their relationship to American culture, which—now at its zenith—can look forward only to decline: our Pacific have pastured The Mediterranean torch and passed it west across the fountains of the morning; And the following desolation that feeds on Crete Feed here. (CP, 1:14) As usual with Jeffers, seeing the natural world—in this case the flight of cormorants, pelicans, and gulls—stirred him to meditate on the fact that human beings and their technology form a scar on the landscape, which will first become

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larger and then disappear, leaving the natural world to restore itself, obliterating all trace of the offending species. Technology, by creating prosperity and luxuries, has been instrumental in effecting not the nation’s ascent but its decline. Jeffers’s larger purpose, however, was not to chide Americans for their decadence and ugly technology but to show that their experience is not unique. The sight of the western edge of the North American continent causes the speaker in “The Torch-Bearer’s Race” (1925) to consider the westward expansion of European civilizations that have risen and fallen. He catalogs those that have passed away, bearing evidence of what will happen to existing ones. The race serves as metaphor for Greek culture, which gave birth to the marathon, and for nations that in their process of growth and decay run a race against time. The carriers of the torch are the cultures of the Euphrates and Nile Rivers, the Ionian and Aegean Seas; the runners are Sappho, Alcaeus, and Aeschylus. Now the torch finds itself at the distant end of a new world where dead tribes, “lost hunters / Our fathers hunted,” were driven westward, died out, and remain unavenged. Just as these tribes—as well as previous ones—perished, so will contemporary people and societies: “Remember that the life of mankind is like the life of a man, a flutter from darkness to darkness / Across the bright hair of a fire. . . .” Yet the last two stanzas betray the hope that, even though ancient wisdom will be “folded like a wine-stained cloth and laid up in darkness, / And the old symbols forgotten,” the ancient knowledge of the passing and rekindling of life will remain, “one fountain  / Of power” (CP, 1:99–101). Like Yeats, Jeffers believed that some symbols may be saved from inevitable destruction. Most of Jeffers’s prophetic poetry, however, denies any permanence other than the continuance of change itself. “Prescription of Painful Ends” (1940) also names the great civilizations that have gone before; the history of Europe and America is “starred with famous Byzantiums and Alexandrias” (CP, 3:14); yet it progresses toward deterioration. Lucretius and Plato watched their republics “riding to the height / Whence every road leads downward.” Although no one individual sees the moment of decline, one may feel it: “at cyclic turns / There is a change felt in the rhythm of events, as when an exhausted horse / Falters and recovers, then the rhythm of the running hoof-beats is changed: he will run miles yet,  / But he must fall.” Jeffers laid out his philosophy of history in “The Broken Balance” (1928), in which he adopted a characteristically bitter tone to prophesy another turn of the historical cycle. Similar to Yeats in “Meditations in Time of Civil War” (1923) and “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” (1921), Jeffers structured this poem into different parts (in this case, seven), each characterized by differences in tone and focus (CP, 1:372–76). The first section of “The Broken Balance,” “Reference to a Passage in Plutarch’s Life of Sulla,” alludes to a poem that refers to Etruscan acceptance of the idea of historical cycles and presents soothsayers of ancient

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Rome foretelling the end of the republic, but not before a strongman, Caesar, comes to power. Engaged in ordinary life (“buying and selling, consuming pleasures, talking in the archways”), the people hear trumpets in the skies signaling that a new age has come (“at the end of each period  / A sign is declared in heaven  / Indicating new times, new customs, a changed people . . .”). The speaker-prophet then brings the focus to the present, declaring he has heard such a “shrill and mournful” trumpet blast, warning of impending transformation. The next section, “To the Children,” links Roman to American history and foretells the coming of an age of power “when abundance / Makes pawns of people” and the “steep singleness of passion / Dies.” Artistic or Apollonian beauty will survive, sheltered in museums (“Loveliness will live under glass”) while Dionisian ele­mental beauty will flee civilization and live in wild places (“And beauty will go savage in the secret mountains”). Jeffers’s speaker admonishes children to “widen” their “minds’ eyes” and “take mountains / Instead of faces,”—that is, to look to nature rather than people, to believe in the physical world rather than society which will be subjugated by “massed power” after individualism, “the lone hawk,” is dead. In keeping with this advice, he departs, in the untitled third section, from the discussion of power to praise creatures of the natural world (“jewel-eyed hawk,” “tall blue heron,” “black cormorants,” “red-shafted woodpecker,” “white star between blood-color hung clouds”), which “live their felt natures”—that is, they live fully—and understand the world as human beings do not. Even the weasel (whose like appears in Yeats’s “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” with more pejorative connotations) possesses a soul purer than those of human beings, who choke their own natures “until the souls die in them.” As ants serve the anthill more than themselves, people serve civilization—to Jeffers the enemy of individualism—and desire progress, pleasure, and death rather than life. Their ancestors possessed virtue as hunters, herdsmen, and swordsmen (providers and warriors) because they lived more elementally, expecting no protection, while present civilization (“the house”) will fall because of corruption. The speaker nevertheless exhorts his reader to “Mourn whom it falls on” and yet “Be glad,” with Nietzschean tragic joy because the cycle will begin again. The three five-line stanzas of section 4, also untitled, serve as a refrain, all ending in the word “perish,” all declaring that the present time is the beginning of the end for humankind. It is nature’s balance that is broken here and the balance human beings used to have with the natural world. The only hope is to recover the elemental past, to reach “down the long morbid roots that forget the plow” and “Discover the depths.” Employing the metaphor of cultivating wine grapes (a possible reference to the sacrament), the speaker follows the processes of plowing, pruning, ripening, and dying back, declaring “When you stand on the peak of time it is time to begin to perish.” Nothing is good but the “beautiful

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enormous dawns of time,” of course, “after we perish.” The speaker pulls back from the focus on nature in section 5, and, seeming to take a wider view of history, prophesies an end to the human species, not merely one nation or one civilization. He allows that, although human beings populated the earth for only one brief accidental moment in geological history, their culture (“that snuffed candle”) contained “a fantastic virtue” and was “moderately admirable.” He takes the point of view of one who stands outside time and “remember[s]” the future. Of course, we remember the past, not the future; the point is that the past is the future: we see from the history of supplanted civilizations what will happen to this and to all others. The tone shifts in section 6, “Palinode” (song of recantation), where Jeffers’s persona, looking at a rock near the edge of the sea, observes the cormorant droppings that were not washed away by rain or wave and imagines them to be a snow mountain at noon, a rose in the morning, and a beacon at moonrise. Because he can find beauty in an unlikely place, he concludes that perhaps even human lives may mean something in the course of history. This slight optimism for the plight of humanity gives way to the more typical Jeffersian meditation in section 7, where the speaker ruminates that, although the wild grasses are trampled by people’s feet, the people will pass away; yet the grasses will survive and “enjoy wonderful vengeances and suck / The arteries and walk in triumph on the faces.” Only the cliff-eating ocean—part of the natural world—poses a real threat to the land. Published much earlier, in 1921, and giving voice to the same pessimism about the future of human beings, Yeats’s “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” meditates on contemporary violence and—poet speaking from the perspective of his tower, as the speaker of “The Broken Balance” also seems to—prophesies more to come. Divided into six sections and included in what many believe to be Yeats’s most powerful book, The Tower, the poem seems to have been precipitated by frequent skirmishes between British Auxiliaries, or Black and Tans, and the Irish Republican Army during the Anglo-Irish War (1919–21). Containing some of Yeats’s most violent images, the poem laments defilement of the most sacred things, apparently with impunity: “a drunken soldiery  / Can leave the mother, murdered at her door, / To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free” (CW, 1:207). A metaphor from the natural world indicates that God is absent or at least refuses to intercede: “The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven” (209). Michael Wood in his thorough discussion of this poem declared that “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” is not about facts but about a mentality (Yeats and Violence, 153). Helen Vendler asserted that Yeats’s subject in this poem is “the enigma of human violence,” not merely that of Ireland in the years 1919–21, and that Yeats chose metaphors from ancient times precisely in order to widen the poem’s historical context (Our Secret Discipline, 64–65). His choice

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of symbols from ancient Greece (mention of Phidias and the Acropolis) and ancient Palestine (Herodias’s daughters), however, narrows his focus somewhat to the two great cultures that are said to have formed the civilizations of Western Europe. Yeats began section 1, written in six ottava-rima stanzas, with a simple declarative statement: “Many ingenious lovely things are gone”—his lament that war destroys art and culture, even the miraculous works of art that “the multitude” thought could withstand the vicissitudes of time and fate (“the circle of the moon / That pitches common things about”). The poet gives the examples of an ancient olive-wood statue3 and Phidias’s famous works of ivory and gold. His speaker seems more frenzied than Jeffers’s in “The Broken Balance,” who from the beginning accepts upheaval and destruction as part of the cycles of history. Yeats’s language reveals a mind coming to grips with the fact that he must abandon his youthful (and even mature) optimism in the face of events unfolding around him. His own and his contemporaries’ belief that a new world order had come into being (“A law indifferent to blame or praise, / To bribe or threat”); that new values had replaced “old wrong,” which melted like wax in the sun’s rays; and that “public opinion” had been forever changed turns out to be illusion. The allusion to the wax of Icarus’s wings melting in the sun places Yeats’s ideal Ireland in ancient tradition: the new society could have realized the dream of flight (from colonial domination) without (Icarus-like) careless overreaching. The “ingenious lovely things” include not only works of art but also the laws and culture that people labored throughout the ages to create. These hopes, however, had been nothing but “pretty toys”—the idealism of those too young to realize that political realities never allow “the worst rogues and rascals” to die out. Michael Wood interpreted the first line of the second stanza (“We too had many pretty toys when young”) to mean not that “we regret the civilization we lost” but that “we are now calling toys the elements of the civilization we were idiotic enough to believe we had” (112). The error lay not in wanting the world to improve but in believing that it could improve (165). The self-chiding continues into the third stanza, where the speaker realizes that nondisarmament is rearmament (“What matter that no cannon had been turned / Into a ploughshare?”) and that vanity, whether of bureaucrat or autocrat (“Parliament and king”), lies at the root of militarism: the trumpets and showy warhorses (armaments) must have a reason to exist. The violence he sees is not only murderous but also meaningless; the equestrian metaphor begun in stanza 4 continues with more haunting imagery: “Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare / Rides upon sleep.”4 Those who dreamed of order and justice were nothing now but “weasels fighting in a hole.” Prescient people able to read the signs (preceding Jeffers’s speaker in “The Broken Balance,” who “remember[s]” the future) knew that no human creation—art or civilization—could withstand

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war. Those who can “read the signs” have only the consolation of philosophy (“ghostly solitude”). Beginning with the image of Loie Fuller’s dancers unwinding a ribbon of cloth in the air, the ten lines of section 2 restate the position that the violent forces of the present are no different from the violent forces of the past and that people, like the “ingenious lovely things,” remain unprotected from these forces, “the circle of the moon / That pitches common things about.” The dancers unwind “A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth” and become the people of the dragonridden days of the fourth stanza, for the dragon takes over the dance and propels them on its—not their—“furious path.” The poet then compares this dance to the Platonic year, which Yeats later described in the introduction to The Resurrection (1931) as the year the equinoctial sun returned to its original place in the constellations after thirty-six thousand years. That year fell during the time of Caesar and Christ (CW, 2:724). The imagery of winding and whirling makes the point that all that has been will be again: violence causes old civilizations to fall, the cycles of history to turn. Like Jeffers, Yeats envisioned the immediate future as one of barbarism, not a flowering of civilization. That would come later, also to be followed by decline. In the process, however, the dancers have become the dance, as they do in a far more celebratory way in “Among School Children,” and history has become a violent dance that, although begun by people, takes on its own “furious” life from which no one is exempt. Human history unfolds like a tragic performance: “All men are dancers and their tread / Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong” (CW, 1:208). The speaker voices, prophetically, the plight of mankind: “Man is in love and loves what vanishes, / What more is there to say?” (CW, 1:208).5 There is more to say, however, in spite of the resigned tone of the rhetorical question. The three ten-line stanzas of section 3 return to the political philosophy introduced in section 1, and the idealistic people who dreamed of a new order but were “crack-pated” then are now corrupt as the old order. The shift in tone of section 5 implicates the reader in the folly of mocking the great, good, and wise who were unable to prevent the turn of the historic wheel and then the self-mockery of the poet. Helen Vendler identified Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound as the source of “great, wise, and good” mocked in this section (Our Secret Discipline, 73), and the ironic tone stems from the echo of the “come all ye” Irish patriotic song as well as the “come with us” of folk tunes (74). The imperative is bitter self-mockery, weightier criticism than the earlier charge of misguided idealism (“we were crack-pated when we dreamed”). The eighteen-line section 6 brings images of horror in three cinematically visual scenes: the tumult of running horses, blind crazed spirits traveling in whirlwinds, and a more terrible fiend stalking in silence. Yeats’s note to the poem indicates that the horses, “garlanded / On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,”

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are ridden by apparitions, “ancient inhabitants of the country” (the Sidhe) who ride “with flowers upon the heads of the horses” (CW, 1:599). Like suddenly animated phantasmagoric carousel mounts, they become “wearied running round and round in their courses” and so break and stampede violently upon the road. While some have handsome riders, some seem to be unmounted (the image of the riderless horse is associated with anarchy in some of Yeats’s later poems), and the image takes the reader back to the murderous ceremonialism of the third stanza of section 1, where Parliament and king seek a reason for their showy militarism, the trumpets and chargers. As they vanish, the blind daughters of Herodias6 ride the “sudden blast of dusty wind.” Just as the vision of desert birds in “The Second Coming” troubles the poet’s sight and is followed by darkness and the image of the rough beast, in this poem the “wind drops, dust settles,” and the thunder of hooves and screeching cries fall silent when the horrible form of the incubus lover Robert Artisson “lurches past,” as the rough beast of “The Second Coming” “slouches” toward Bethlehem (CW, 1:187).7 Vendler identified the irrationality of sexual satisfaction (Our Secret Discipline, 75), but Wood countered that there is no satisfaction here, only desire, the source of turbulence to come (Yeats and Violence, 208–9). At any rate the poet gives no answer to his own question “But is there any comfort to be found?” (CW, 1:208). The poem ends where it began—as does “The Broken Balance”—with the certainty of apocalypse, whatever form or formlessness it takes. Jeffers’s poem “Rearmament” (1938) echoes Yeats’s “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”—as well as his earlier “Easter, 1916” (1920)—in its depiction of human beings as dancers moving to the rhythms of a violent history. Jeffers described the rearmament of the nations of Europe as “the tragic beauty that they build” (CP, 2:515) just as Yeats both admired and described the “terrible beauty” (CW, 1:180–82) and transformative power of self-sacrifice in “Easter, 1916.” More terrifying, however, than the “excess of love” that “bewildered” the Irish heroes into martyrdom in Yeats’s poem, the rearmament in Jeffers’s poem is “monstrous,” for it is not born of love, and it does not bear the identities of brave individuals but faceless mass violence. Still the rearmament is “grandeur,” beautiful “as a river flowing or a slowly gathering / Glacier on a high mountain rock-face, / Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November, / The gold and flaming deathdance for leaves.” As the Irish heroes in “Easter, 1916” “dreamed and are dead,” however, those who live in the shadow of rearmament are “Dream-led,” almost devoid of free will in the face of the massive “movements toward death.” Like those in Yeats’s “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” Jeffers’s modern people are works of art, dancers created by the forces of history: The beauty of modern Man is not in the persons but in the

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Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the Dream-led masses down the dark mountain. (CP, 2:515) They seem more like zombies, however, less tragically beautiful than Yeats’s dancers or martyrs to the cause of Irish freedom, who, although “bewildered,” are nevertheless noble enough to be “number[ed]” in his “song” (CW, 1:180–82). In “Battle (May 28, 1940),” Jeffers asserted that no matter how terrible the fight or how many the deaths, they are inevitable, “all in the whirling circles of time” (CP, 3:22), resembling Yeats’s gyres. The evils of 1940, foreseen for so long, are yet “no easier to bear.” Populations saw them “with slow stone strides” approaching, like Yeats’s rough beast in “The Second Coming,” “moving its slow thighs” after the “stony sleep” of two thousand years (CW, 1:187). Although people might become sane if they lived apart from each other and allowed the beauty of field, mountain, ocean, and stars to enter their minds, the hope is still “Another dream, another dream.” The speaker resolves to perceive battle as a “burning flower” or “huge music” and the “dive bomber’s screaming orgasm” beautiful as human passion. The last stanza of this poem, irregularly rhymed tetrameter lines with trimeter refrains, addresses a beloved as “my dear” (as Yeats’s personae do in “The Dolls” [1914] and “The Three Bushes” [1937]) and ends each refrain with the word “time” which wheels, orbits, and turns. Two Jeffers poems, “Diagram” and “Real and Half Real” (1947), seem to be intentional allusions to Yeats’s notion of the cycles of history in A Vision and to prophesy the turning toward a new one. Jeffers placed them among some of his most acerbic political poems in his most violent and bitter book, The Double Axe, written during the years of World War II. “Diagram” describes two arcs in the air: Look, there are two curves in the air: the air That man’s fate breathes: there is the rise and fall of the Christian culture-complex, that broke its dawn-cloud Fifteen centuries ago, and now past noon Drifts to decline; (CP, 3:120). The next, vaster, curve for Jeffers began at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, within Jeffers’s lifetime. The lines intersect: as the Christian era passes its highest point, its “noon,” the second begins. The time is “pivotal” and “marked by insane splendors and agonies,” like the prancing war horses and the murdered mother in Yeats’s “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.” Jeffers’s persona warns the children soon to be born, “Not far away down the hawk’s-nightmare future: you will see monsters.” The airplane—an invention, not a sacred birth—can bring no salvation, only destruction. “Real and Half Real” first compares Columbus to Noah’s dove sent “to find a new world,” then turns to the twentieth century and the

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invention of the airplane. Jeffers’s poem articulates the notion of two cycles, again reminiscent of Yeats’s primary and antithetical gyres: These are the two great turnings In a thousand years: you notice how the names mark them: do you see myth Leaning tall from her darkness over the shoulder of history, guiding The hand that writes? A dove discovers new lands; a legendary artificer, doubled to symbolize Importance, invents the plane. (CP, 3:129) The Wright brothers invented the flying machine. The name “Wright” means “one who constructs” (from Old English wryhta), and thus Jeffers linked them to the fabulous artificer Daedalus, who fashioned wings for flight; furthermore, Jeffers noted, the man chosen to crack the “iron shell of Europe” is named “Ironhewer” (Eisenhower). The present age thus closes with the invention of mechanical flight, which will lead to a new age of destruction. Here, as in “Rearmament,” people are actors playing preordained roles. The coincidences of the names of those who propel history serve as evidence: “There seems to be something / Intentional in these coincidences. Perhaps they are token / That what makes history is not the actors.” The drama of human history, as the greatest writers (Jeffers named Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy, and Sophocles) knew, is in fact written by something external: “Invisible wires are pulled, the passionate puppets gesticulate, Napoleon, Oedipus / And Hitler perform their pre-formed agonies.” Not dancers but actors playing these parts—who are themselves more like puppets than living performers—speak of something beyond themselves and their own time. What is earnest and real, Jeffers asserted, is the natural world—the coast hills above Soberanes Creek, which runs into the sea, and the eagle “wheeling and rocking, high and alone / Against the cloud-lid,” circling in flight like the turning cycles of history. Jeffers concluded this poem with another statement that human beings are players on a stage not of their making: “That men should play the parts assigned to them and do it bravely, emulating / The nobility of nature, but well in mind / That their play is a play; it is serious but not important; what’s done in earnest is done outside it” (CP, 3:130). At the end the actors become human again and regain their nobler nature, so long as they revere nature more than themselves. Nature is real; civilization is the half-real. A possible source for Jeffers’s tragic actors in the human drama is Yeats’s late poem “Lapis Lazuli” (1938), in which he most notably used the trope of human beings as players and most clearly sounded the Nietzschean themes of exaltation and tragic knowledge. By rejecting modern oratory and propaganda in the first stanza, the poet faces death and all the imperfections of modern life. The second, more lyrical, stanza begins with the statement “All perform their tragic

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play,” then names them—“There struts Hamlet, there is Lear / That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia” (CW, 1:294)—adopting the tone of a seasoned playgoer. Although “struts” alludes to Macbeth’s description of life as an ignominious “poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage /And then is heard no more” (Macbeth, 5.5.24–26), Yeats’s using the term in this way to describe four of the most tragic characters in all English drama establishes an ironic if not comic tone. The players, “If worthy their prominent part in the play, / Do not break up their lines to weep.” That is, they know that enacting the play expresses the sorrow more poignantly than they could as individuals. They are actors as well as tragic figures; they represent tragedy but also the playing of it—a clue that Yeats, as well as Shakespeare, suggested that human beings are all in a sense actors playing parts, which brings up the question of who is writing the script. Having learned wisdom from their roles, the players are able to exult in their tragic vision and be transformed through tragic joy: “They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay; / Gaiety transfiguring all that dread” (CW, 1:294). The poet knows that all things shall pass away (“All men have aimed at, found and lost”), but they shall be rebuilt when the cycles revolve again. Alluding to the imagery of “The Phases of the Moon,” the poet describes the phenomenon of phase 15, when heaven blacks out, then (“blazing into the head”) brings the soul to the point where body, thought, and image are one: will has been roused to its fullest so that it may overcome all obstacles. Knowing that he faces irrevocable defeat, the poet understands that he must not despair but rather must rejoice, for the energy with which the will approaches obstacles is true happiness. Such final insight—gay awareness of irrevocable defeat—is “tragedy wrought to its uttermost,” the joy of conflict for the sake of ideas and their consequences. Knowledge of cycles of personal as well as social history enables them to gaze upon their own and their society’s tragic history with acceptance but also joy born of wisdom—what Yeats called “gaiety.” The third stanza brings on stage people of ancient cultures that have supplanted others: On their own feet they came, or on shipboard, Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back, Old civilizations put to the sword. (CW, 1:294) Not only are the civilizations (identified by their mounts as Arabic, European, Mediterranean, and Irish) destroyed, but what Yeats cared most for—art—is also destroyed: “They and their wisdom went to rack.” Here again the speaker recognizes eternal recurrence: “All things fall and are built again.” No famous civilization has escaped its fate; much of the work of great men such as Callimachus (“Who handled marble as if it were bronze,  / Made draperies that seemed to rise / When sea-wind swept the corner”) is destroyed, for the course of history

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decrees perpetual destruction and re-creation. The will can effect one thing only. It can inspire individuals with joy that they may continue to overcome obstacles: “And those that build them again are gay” (CW, 1:295). Yeats’s attitude here differs from Jeffers’s. Although Years also recognized the destructive force of the cycles of history, his tone is jubilant while Jeffers’s is ominous. While he did not relish the destruction, Yeats did not lament it either, because he was convinced that civilization would be rebuilt. In his work we find no hint of the eclipse of all humanity. No longer is man in love with what vanishes; now he relishes the creative possibilities of apocalypse. More clearly Nietzschean and Spenglerian than Jeffers, Yeats followed Blake in the belief that although contraries are necessary, progression follows them. In the third and fourth stanzas the poet observes not historical events but a work of art—three figures carved in lapis lazuli—and enters his own creation, imagining these figures seated in their shelter en route to a summit, where they stare “on all the tragic scene”—that is, the history and future of humankind— removed from the course of historical events and immortalized in art. As the serving-man musician begins to play, these figures stare, with joy and detachment, on the tragic scene of the world and are transformed in their vision: “Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, / Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay” (CW, 1:295). Callan speculated that Spengler may have influenced Yeats’s description of the figures with his observation in “Act and Portrait” that “In China the face is like a landscape, full of wrinkles and little signs that mean something” (qtd. in Callan, 602). In the poem the Chinamen have certainly witnessed and transcended suffering and know that the fate of humankind is inevitable. They are beyond tragedy, like Jeffers’s Orestes, who climbs “the tower beyond time” to enter the timelessness of nature. Helen Vendler remarked that the poem represents a “relentless march” through history and then the suspended time of meditation (Our Secret Discipline, 238). Identifying its relationship to Keatsian ekphrasis, she stated that the figures on the carving exist immune to tragic feeling even before the spectacle of “the play” of history (238). Yeats’s poem moves from irritation or anger in the first stanza to philosophical-artistic enjoyment even though the subject of the poem is still inevitable destruction. He did not put forth quietude as the response to the “hysterical women” at the beginning of the poem, who are impatient with painters, musicians, and poets creating art while war gathers ominously once again. The answer is not detachment but engagement: the persona does not imagine the Chinamen looking away from the tragic scene but toward it, and their “glittering eyes” are “gay” not because they enjoy the destruction but because they know that the impulses to destroy and to create are both deepseated in the human psyche. The job of the poet is to create beauty, and here the beauty is tragic. Yeats remembered Zarathustra’s triumphant affirmation:

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“For joy, even if woe is deep, joy is deeper yet than agony” (Thus Spake Zarathustra, 434). Published earlier (1934), W. B. Yeats’s sonnet “Meru”—the last poem in a cycle called “Supernatural Songs,” which are concerned with the cycles of history—seems a preface to “Lapis Lazuli” and declares that although people think civilization is well-ordered and peaceful, nevertheless man despite his terror, cannot cease Ravening through century after century, Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come Into the desolation of reality. (CW, 1:289) The “desolation of reality” is awareness that human beings do not embody all the truth and knowledge of the centuries but are prisoners of their own drive to destroy as well as create. Yeats’s tone is not horrified but gleeful: “Egypt and Greece good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!” the speaker says in the last line of the octave. In the sestet he announces his cyclical theory of history: Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest, Caverned in night under the drifted snow, Or where that snow and winter’s dreadful blast Beat down upon their naked bodies, know That day brings round the night, that before dawn His glory and his monuments are gone. (CW, 1:289) Here he acknowledges that all the great civilizations face inevitable destruction but that those who stoically watch the cycles of history gain wisdom in the process, like the Chinamen whose vision concludes “Lapis Lazuli.” The poem that precedes “Lapis Lazuli” and begins New Poems (1938), “The Gyres,” greets the inevitability of historic cycles with Nietzschean tragic joy and prepares the reader for its affirmation in “Lapis Lazuli.” In three ottava-rima stanzas “The Gyres” celebrates the turning of the gyres from “a more gracious time” to one in which “Irrational streams of blood are staining earth” (CW, 1:293). In the first stanza the poet addresses “Old Rocky Face”—perhaps the moon or more likely an age in its petrified last incarnation8—to look upon the earth in a phase in which traditional art and philosophy can no longer influence people: “Things thought too long can be no longer thought / For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth, / And ancient lineaments are blotted out.” The Greek philosopher Empedocles, who first articulated the theory of conservation of matter and energy, has created havoc. As the ancient world was burned (“Hector is dead and there’s a light in Troy”), the present one is destroying itself. The poet and philosopher, watching history from a detached perspective (like the moon’s), can only “laugh in tragic joy.”

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The second stanza, through a series of rhetorical questions, asserts that he will not lament the terror of the present and the loss of “A greater, a more gracious time.” Alluding to his resigned question (“What matter that no sword had been turned into a ploughshare”) and the nightmare image from “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” as well as the “fury and mire of human veins” (CW, 1:248) of “Byzantium,” he asks “What matter though numb nightmare ride on top  / And blood and mire the sensitive body stain?” (CW, 1:293). He will not sigh for an older world again but celebrate with Nietzschean joy: “Out of Cavern comes a voice / And all it knows is that one word ‘Rejoice.’” Yeats did not write “out of the cavern,” using one anapestic foot in an otherwise iambic line, but “Out of Cavern,” with its omission of the specific article possibly alluding to Plato’s cave but more likely, as Callan noted, making a specific reference to Leo Frobenius, Spengler’s German source, whose writings became part of Yeats’s mythological system (603). Both Old Rocky Face and Cavern are antithetical symbols, the preceding and succeeding ages (605). The concluding stanza reaffirms that, while the culture coarsens, inspired individuals will continue to create. Twice in stanza 2 the poet-philosopher asks “What matter?” but in this final stanza he exclaims “What matter!” and asserts that artists and poets (“Those that Rocky Face holds dear, / Lovers of horses and of women”) will look to ancient art or myth (“From marble of a broken sepulcher . . . Or any rich, dark nothing”) to “disinter / The workman, noble and saint,” the images necessary to create a new civilization patterned on the old; afterward the world will turn “On that unfashionable gyre again.” Jeffers offered a different answer to the question of whether humankind, God, or fate engenders violence. He wrote in “A Little Scraping” (1933) that, since God placed violence in men’s hearts, God is the cause of the annihilation. Freedom resides not in escape from reincarnation but in our acceptance of the cyclical nature of history and the beauty of the earth. Violence, however, is the necessary catalyst for Jeffers as well as for Yeats. “Contemplation of the Sword” (1941) voices the conviction that violence, not reason, will decide the movement of events. The sword in this poem represents all weapons, of course—including the much more destructive modern ones as well as “treachery and cowardice, incredible baseness, incredible courage, loyalties, insanities . . . / weeping and despair, mass-enslavement, mass torture, frustration of all the hopes  / That starred man’s forehead” (CP, 2:544). In “The Bloody Sire” (1940) violence is the patriarch of the world’s values; old values beget new values: “Who would remember Helen’s face / Lacking the terrible halo of spears?” (CP, 3:25). As Yeats mused in A Vision (1937), “Helen could not be Helen but for beleaguered Troy” (268). Choosing the big-bang theory of the creation of the universe as the central metaphor of “Explosion” (published in 1963), Jeffers sought to explain the reason

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for human beings’ violent nature. After describing the theory in the first stanza, Jeffers hypothesized that humankind’s desire for destruction comes from the great explosion, that it “might be held to explain our awful / Interest in atomsplitting and nuclear bombs” (CP, 3:413): We build a civilization and explode it: quite natural: Nature did worse before. We are born of explosion and homesick for it; our little blasts Echo that huge one. (CP, 3:413) Yet all the energies gather together: “the whole universe beats like a heart”; God’s promise, said Jeffers, never included peace but “back and forth, die and live, burn and be damned.” We see the beauty and share it above our torment: “that’s what life’s for.” This is no God of love and justice, no “anthropoid God / Making commandments” (CP, 3:414) who looks at the tides, stars, and fall of nations. Far more ominous than the forces of history in Yeats’s “Meru,” the “faceless violence” in Jeffers’s poem is “the root of all things” (CP, 3:14). “The Great Explosion” also continues the metaphor of the beating heart and the universe expanding and contracting: “all that exists / Roars into flame” (CP, 3:471), pointing out the irrelevance of people thinking that they are the center of the universe, a misconception born of narcissism: “No wonder we are so fascinated with fire-works / And our huge bombs: it is a kind of homesickness perhaps for the howling fire-blast that we were born from” (CP, 3:471). Although “A Little Scraping” voices the conviction that universal violence is foreordained, Jeffers’s late poem “The Urchin” articulates a similar belief to Yeats’s in “The Second Coming” that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity” (CW, 1:187). Jeffers’s persona confesses, “It’s a bitter saying, that war / Will be won by the worst, what else can I say?” (CP, 3:416). Jeffers’s poem, no less prophetic and more pessimistic—informed as it is by the atomic age—draws its images from the visible world but also relies on emblem. The urchin of the title is not a sea creature but a tricky spirit that directs historic events. The poet asks the spirit to “prove our knowledge false”—to subvert what he sees as the coming holocaust: We know that as civilization Advances, so wars increase. We know that this century Is devoted to world-wars; we know that an armaments-race makes war. To heap up weapons—what weapons!— On both sides of a fence makes war certain as sunrise—(CP, 3:415) The spirit, however, cannot perform the same trick. The deep instincts that inform the activities of human beings are too strong:

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Fear, envy, pride of kind and the killer’s passion, are past your power. They are terribly in earnest, And the other mere speculation. No wonder they are earnest: for ages Beyond reckoning those who retain them have killed or enslaved those who renounce them. (CP, 3:416) It is noteworthy that in this poem Jeffers arrived at the same conclusion Yeats did in “Two Songs from a Play” (1927): “Whatever flames upon the night / Man’s own resinous heart has fed” (CW, 1:214). For Jeffers in “The Urchin” as for Yeats, the violent cycles of history are fueled by deep-seated human drives. Both believed that people were destroying what could save them: in Yeats’s poetic vision of a unified culture based on nation and place, this was tradition; in Jeffers’s ecoprophetic view, this was contemplation of the beauty of the earth and realization of human beings’ minor place in it. Still, the poets celebrated the cycles of history because they represent renewal.

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4. Solitary Hero versus Social Man— Jeffers’s Dear Judas and Yeats’s Calvary In “Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years” Jeffers imagined a great poet whose work endures because it transcends the temporal and mundane. If the poet were to write a “great poetic play he would probably never see it staged” (CP, 4:426). Yet if the play is “fierce enough,” it may transcend layers of civilization and reach the primitive instincts and permanent values that Jeffers maintained are needful in great art (425, 427). In the same essay Jeffers identified Yeats as a great poet who “sought in the theater his liberation from mediocrity” and claimed that although Yeats was not “a first-rate playwright . . . he had an insuperable will” (426) that enabled him to achieve that liberation. Yeats’s play Calvary (1920), which was not staged in his lifetime, may have inspired or influenced Jeffers’s Dear Judas (1928). Both treatments of the Easter story are concerned not only with betrayal and redemption but also with archetypes of betrayer and savior, solitary hero and communal man. As Yeats did, Jeffers examined the psychology of the participants in order to evoke the meaning of the events and their importance in Western culture. One style of drama that could examine these themes ritualistically was the Japanese Noh. In his introductory note to the play, Jeffers wrote “The Japanese Noh plays, in which the action is performed by ghosts revisiting the scenes of their passions, no doubt influenced my conception” (CP, 5:451). According to Robert Zaller, Jeffers set Dear Judas in the “suspended time” of Noh drama so that the protagonists could enact passions in the form of ritual (“Spheral

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Eternity,” 259). Dear Judas, Zaller noted in The Cliffs of Solitude, is a verse drama in the strictest and most stylized of all conventions, the Noh theater of Japan (131). Terence Diggory also discussed Yeats’s influence on Dear Judas as a Noh play, going so far as to assert that Jeffers borrowed the form from Yeats (Yeats and American Poetry, 125). Jeffers wrote that the producer of his play had been attracted by “the fascination of what’s difficult,” thus quoting Yeats’s poem of that name (125). The allusion to the title of Yeats’s poem about the difficulty of theater work, Diggory argued, indicates that Dear Judas was modeled on the Japanese Noh. Jeffers acknowledged in private correspondence that he particularly had in mind the Noh as interpreted by Yeats and Pound (Selected Letters, 369). Diggory also suggested that the theme of consciousness after death may have come to Jeffers from Yeats’s 1919 play The Dreaming of the Bones (125), which, like Calvary, is concerned with places haunted by ghosts (and hence haunted by history and memory) who return to reenact their passions. Jeffers subtitled his play The Dreaming Dead and opened it with an unnamed speaker intoning that “three remnant images of three passions too violent to vanish / Still haunt the garden” (CP, 2:5). In Calvary the First Musician introduces the action with “Good Friday’s come, / The day whereon Christ dreams His passion through. / He climbs up hither but as a dreamer climbs” (CW, 2:330). Yeats conceived of his play as an illustration of a basic distinction in his visionary psychology between objective men, who—however personally alone they may be—exist in relation to others, and subjective men, who exist for themselves “seeking always that which is unique or personal” (Yeats’s note, CW, 2:696). Diggory explained that for Jeffers, communal man, absorbed in humankind, was subjective, while solitary man, open to the natural world, could be objective (126). Yeats’s subjective man was thus Jeffers’s objective man. Diggory expanded on their contrasting conceptions of betrayer and savior: “In Dear Judas, the contrast between pitying love and possessive love that Jeffers intended to represent in the conflict between Judas and Jesus can be better understood in terms of the distinction between solitary and communal man. Judas, who betrays Jesus because he pities the masses who might submit to Jesus’s rule, is communal man; Jesus, who seeks to separate himself from humanity by becoming a god, is solitary. Yeats’s Judas responds to Jesus’ communal pity with the rebellion of the solitary, betraying Jesus in order to free himself, not others” (126). Yeats’s description in A Vision (1937) of the separation between love and pity may help to explain his characterization of the antagonists in Calvary: We say of Him because His sacrifice was voluntary that He was love itself, and yet that part of Him which made Christendom was not love but pity, and not pity for intellectual despair, though the man in Him, being

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antithetical like His age, knew it in the Garden, but primary pity, that for the common lot, man’s death, seeing that He raised Lazarus, sickness, seeing that He healed many, sin, seeing that He died. (275) Yeats’s Judas possesses the Nietzschean will to power in creating himself entirely by himself, defying God and fate. Jeffers on the other hand reversed the orientation of the two principal characters, making Judas the one filled with pitying love of mankind and Jesus the one who creates himself by virtue of the will because he believes it is his destiny. Certainly Judas tries to free himself of tormenting pity: . . . I am in prison of my pity; the moaning of men and beasts torments me; the pain is not my own pain From which I come praying for deliverance. (CP, 2:7) When the time comes for betrayal, he justifies himself in terms of his concern for the followers of Jesus, who—Judas believes—will be deluded into suicidally challenging the Roman soldiers. Yeats’s Judas on the other hand betrays Christ in order to assure his own damnation, which—he believes—assures triumph of will. Jeffers’s Judas wants to be saved but knows Jesus has no power to save him (CP, 2:7). He, not Jesus, makes the salvific sacrifice; yet his action results not in making him one with the people but in isolating him from both his master and the people. Jeffers declared throughout his work—especially in “Sign-Post” and Roan Stallion—that the ultimate salvation for humankind lies in transcendence of self, in turning outward from humanity toward God and nature, not in introspection. Robert Zaller wrote, regarding Dear Judas, “It is not Jesus who is sacrificed for all mankind but all mankind that is sacrificed to Jesus, including the human body of Jesus himself ” (Cliffs of Solitude, 141). The only character in the play who realizes the full implication of the necessary sacrifice is Judas, but Judas does not want Jesus to die and hopes to save him by betraying him. Not the least of Jeffers’s accomplishments, Zaller asserted, is rendering the archetypal villain of Western culture a sympathetic and tragic figure (142). In Jesus, on the other hand, Jeffers suggested the tormented personality, vulnerability and mastery, delusion and truth, fear of maternal encroachment, and quest for the idealized father (143). “Meditation on Saviors” and “Theory of Truth” also suggest that Jesus represents not a man of compassion but of power. In “Meditation” as well as in Dear Judas Jeffers’s Jesus loves aggressively. The poet contrasts Jesus’s complicity in violence with the Buddha’s persuasion by virtuous example (CP, 1:396–401). In “Theory of Truth” the tormented savior engenders a tormented age in which the savior’s finding the truth brings insanity:

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. . . Too loving to curse his mother, desert-driven, devil-haunted The beautiful young poet found truth in the desert, but found also Fantastic solution of hopeless anguish. The carpenter was not his father? Because God was his father, Not a man sinning, but the pure holiness and power of god. His personal anguish and insane solution Have stained an age; nearly two thousand years are one vast poem drunk with the wine of his blood. (CP, 2:609) Arthur B. Coffin compared Dear Judas with The Loving Shepherdess, where the protagonist, Clare Walker, is also a tormented would-be savior who ends her life in the spring: “Thus the pastoral image moving toward sacrifice at Easter is the first correspondence between the story of Clare and that of Jesus in the preceding poem” (Robinson Jeffers, 112). Jesus and Judas in Dear Judas both know the crucifixion is wrong (110), and Jesus knows that people will misunderstand his teachings. Clare Walker is also misunderstood, and her sacrifice is inefficacious, unnecessary, and destructive of more than herself. Although her choice has moral significance, nothing can be redeemed by her death. Her sheep are lost through her sacrifice of her body to the unborn child, who can never survive because of her rejection of the operation that would enable it to enter a world she considers to be hopelessly full of sorrow. Investigating the psychology of power, love, pity, and ambition, Jeffers in Dear Judas creates archetypes but also fully realized people with complex motivations: Mary (who is at first ominously called “The Woman”) wants to keep secret her sin of adultery but also see her son triumphant; Judas wants to prevent a blood bath but see Christ’s mission fulfilled; Lazarus wants to escape his tortured life. In this play Jeffers included the same characters as those Yeats brought into Calvary—Jesus, Judas, and Lazarus—but also included Mary, who Diggory has called the source of the tragedy (125), and excluded Yeats’s three Roman soldiers and musicians. Mary articulates her own confusion and blames herself for all the trouble; nevertheless it is through her descriptions of the ragged people and the half-caste Greeks she sees on her way to find Jesus that the old city comes alive (CP, 2:40). As in Yeats’s play, unnamed figures in the drama wear masks, and their movements suggest a dumb show. Nineteen hundred years have passed, and Jesus admonishes, “Dear Judas be comforted at last” (5). Judas claims at the outset, “I have done the worst thing I can imagine. Oh, yes: for the money” (5), but later admits that pity for mankind moved him to commit the betrayal (19, 23). Jeffers’s Judas wants to restrain Jesus’s will but finds himself caught in the prison of his pity. Judas laments that the rock is happy and the shepherd (a traditional biblical metaphor for Christ) does not think of the sheep’s pain before

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he knifes him (CP, 2:6). Jesus possesses no power to save him (Judas), and the others’ joy is not his, only their suffering (7). Judas, however, wants to save the people—from Christ’s overweening “love.” Even though Jesus declares that he is building a kingdom on compassion, Judas believes Jesus is leading his people to bloody destruction (16). Having found the key to the people’s hearts, Jesus has become terrible in his power (19) and cries out in a voice unlike his own but like the gulls hunting their prey over the fishing boats (18). Believing that Christ’s kingdom dwells on earth, Judas equates the people with birds charmed by a serpent (Jesus) who will incite them to riot (21, 23); Jesus seems to fulfill Judas’s expectations of him since he declares that two thousand years are laid in his hands like grains of corn (28). Mary’s revelations on the other hand suggest that Jesus’s kingdom is neither of this world or the next but is only his delusion. Although she rejoices that he has come into his power, she reveals that she has lied about the conception, covering her adultery with glory (35). Jesus declares that Judas lacks faith and is the fool of pity (30). Judas agrees, calling mercy a fool and pity a murderer (40). Judas further declares that by doing the worst he should be free of tormenting pity (42), but he is not. He is horrified by love from which pity is absent and love tainted by need for power. He chooses the many over the one, taking the guilt for Jesus’s death and the sacrificial role Jesus has reserved for himself; yet he does not achieve communion with the people. His describing himself as dwelling in the “prison” of his pity is another term indicating isolation (7). The pity he feels may also be temptation to power although he does not realize it. Jesus replies that the root of forgiveness is that all creatures do exactly what they must do (30–31) and that it is man’s honor to be the dupes of god (30). All power, including love and mercy, Jesus declares, crushes its object (33). The familiar religious iconography of light and darkness underscores Jeffers’s tropes, the light here not suggestive of holiness, purity, or understanding, but of delusion, the darkness not of evil but of secrecy, betrayal, and misdirected love. Jesus’s association with light is unsurprising until one realizes that Jeffers employs it to emphasize the irony of Jesus’s lack of understanding although his “vision” enables the creation of the “poem” of two thousand years (“Theory of Truth,” CP, 2:608). Mary, usually represented as incarnate purity, here is an adulterous liar related to darkness. Judas, associated with shadow, represents not the evil of the betrayer but the confusion of people of ostensible goodwill in times that demand compromise and understanding. Jesus looks to the city shining in the morning like a jewel (10); Judas by contrast claims “I dread the shining like the shining of paradise” (10). When Mary states that Jesus walks at night, Judas insists it is the pearl of morning (10). Mary praises Jesus as “The shining that came forth from between my thighs” (8). Judas describes Jesus, saying: “He went up shining” and was like a flame (18); he possesses “the shining power”

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(19) and is “white burning noon” and “white beauty / Above them like the mastlight over a boat” (22). Jesus claims “My sun has risen” (15) and “I am making a power weaponed with love not violence; a white / Dominion; a smokeless lamp; a pure light” (16) and later declares “I hold the shining triumph” (27) and “I know / Beyond illusion the enormous beauty of the torch in which our agonies and all are particles of fire” (34). Judas on the other hand walks in the shadow of doubt. He recognizes the threat from Jerusalem: “Our black shadows that move / Immeasurably stretched on the white road, they seem to reach even to Jerusalem, trouble my soul” (10). Even when the dawn comes he notices “all the long clear shadows lying toward Jerusalem” (13). Mary advises him to follow his shadow back to Nazareth. That Jeffers uses the image of brightness and shining as symbolic of impending decline from the pinnacle of power is clear from his use of shine as imperative in the titles of poems foretelling the destruction of America—“Shine, Perishing Republic,” “Shine, Republic,” and “Shine, Empire”— and the beautiful shining fish caught in the net in “The Purse Seine.” In Dear Judas the woman (Mary), identified with “incarnate Night” (11), says “I Night am your mother” (11), calls herself “I Night the Mother” (12), and declares “I was the mother Night” (17). Judas also describes her as “the Mother / Night” (43). When she begins to fear for Jesus and herself, she looks for refuge in darkness: “I wish the night of darkness would cover me” (36). Darkness and betrayal are equated here because Mary, not Judas, is the ultimate betrayer. She tells Judas “I am the first that betrayed him” (42) and “The mothers, we do it” (42) while to herself she admits that she lied to “cover” her sin (25). For all her bitterness and weakness, Mary becomes convinced that Jesus will redeem her earthly life. After the betrayal she voices her faith: They have brought me words that shine like new stars . . . Oh omnipotent God, with whom through delusion he is joined in truth, How marvellously thou hast made my secret sin the glory of the world. I saw his triumph in his eyes Before they told me. Without my sin he’d not have been born, nor yet without my falsehood have triumphed, For that exalted his deceived heart to the height of his destiny. Now they have told me that to-day Is the set day, and he enters his kingdom. (35) Mary believes the kingdom to be earthly, that both Herod and Pilate will kneel before her son who will issue decrees (35), although earlier she wished for Jesus to give up his ambition. We never learn why she considers herself a betrayer other than the fact that she bears him and falsifies his parentage. That she is fated to relive the passion every night suggests that she is a necessary part

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of the whole and does not act freely, contradicting the possibility of choice and intentional betrayal on her part or Judas’s. Mary learns that Jesus’s courage stems from her telling him he is the son of God (25) and tries to convince him not to sacrifice himself for Jerusalem, that he is better as a prophet of the fishermen and villagers than as a great leader who scorns both danger and wisdom (25–26). She appears too weak to tell him the truth—that his conception was the result of her adultery—although she does not appear to be afraid of public opinion now that Jesus is grown, and her concern is not for herself but for Jesus’s triumph and safety. Her ambivalence alone would give the truth away if Jesus were not so confident of his divinity—“the faith that is the fountain of my life,” he calls it (26). Although troubled about his paternity, Jesus will not relinquish his claim to divinity. Through Mary’s dialogue, Jeffers also introduced into the poem the imagery of the fishing net, which he employed throughout his poetic career to show that fate or history circumscribes all people, including Jesus. All the characters invoke the imagery of the net, but especially Mary, who tells the fishermen that a net catches all men, that no one is free (8) and that even Jesus will go where the net draws him (12). Jesus too testifies that he was taken in a net that drove him to wander in the desert (9). Judas describes the net of cruelty (13), that God’s will is a net (31). Nor can Jesus escape: “I am in the net, and this deliberately sought / Torture on the cross is the only real thing” (34). Jesus, in telling Judas of the violence that will follow his crucifixion, sings part of the song Mary has sung to the fishermen earlier: I bid you beware of the net, fishermen. You see men walking and they seem to be free but look at the faces, they’re caught. There was never a man cut himself loose. (31) Mary sang I bid you beware of the net, fishermen. You never can see it. It flies through the white air and we are all snapped in it. No, but look round you. You see men walking and they seem to be free, But look at the faces, they’re caught. There was never a man cut himself loose. (8) Only Lazarus escapes capture and confinement: “No, Mary, I am out of that net,” he declares to her; “I would to God that you were out of that net” (38). Unlike that of “The Purse-Seine,” which represents the indomitable power of civilization drawing its cords around people, here the image suggests religion and the

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will of Jesus to change the course of history. God’s will, or man interpreting God’s will, draws in its victims. Even Jesus declares the dangerous power of religion: “All power crushes its object, there is none innocent.  / Religion is the most tyrannous, worming its way through the ears and eyes to the cup of spirit, overgrowing / The life in its pool with alien and stronger life . . .” (33). He then pronounces ominously that “no man shall live / As if I had not lived” (33) and declares that he will sacrifice to that end all the hopes of the villagers, his mother, his own flesh, and Judas himself (33). Jesus is the maniacal self-absorbed leader who began with ideals of love and mercy but who has sacrificed all to his vision; “My soul is all towers” (15) he answers when Judas tries to convince him to return to his loyal followers in Galilee (14). Judas pities people and cannot keep from compromising his love of Jesus in order to try to save people he does not know. Judas, whose love is pure but whose pity for mankind interferes with his resolve, represents the doubt born of the conflict of two loyalties. He must act, but he cannot act without betraying someone—either Jesus or the people who will be led to their deaths. Judas knows that Jesus’s philosophy of love has turned to ambition. He warns Jesus, “Dear Master, / Too many have made rebellions before; they are drowned in blood” (12). Remembering Jesus’s driving the merchants from the temple, Judas describes not moral resolve but heedless cruelty: He twisted a whip out of hard cords And drove them, and made a screaming riot in the temple . . . One poor old man Had fallen and cut his forehead on the brass edge of the tray, and lay weeping among the crushed candies, His white hair matted with watery blood. We lifted him up. I cannot tell whether Jesus has gone mad, or has indeed grown Too near the power that makes falcons and lions, earthquakes and Rome . . . (19). Faced with the necessity of having to betray his master in order to save people, Judas rationalizes his intention to turn Jesus over to the authorities: What harm can they do him, but keep him Three or four days for the city peace and dismiss him? He has made no insurrection till now (from hour to hour he may do it—who knows his mind?—to captain A river of blood) they’ll only keep him quiet and dismiss him home. There he’ll not dream of towers, But the sweet and passionate mind walk humbly. (23–24)

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Judas wants Jesus to return to Nazareth to become a prophet of rural people, as Mary has also asked. Later he begs Jesus to be merciful as he has taught others (30), but of course Jesus will not listen. Lazarus is the only one to find peace and truth—in the oblivion of death. He declares that the great passions for which life is not wide enough are not so easily exhausted but echo in the wood for years or millennia (37). There lies one pathway to peace for a great passion—truth, which is that life, not death, should be conquered (39). Although Jesus enjoins Judas to remember the “lioncolored hills,” the lake, and the locusts (6), it is Lazarus who throughout the play voices Jeffers’s conviction about the centrality of the natural world. Having felt oblivion, he knows that freedom is found in being part of nature and losing the individuation of consciousness. Dismissing Jesus and “the other at the poles of the wood” who praise God “after the monstrous manner of mankind” (44), Lazarus articulates the most lyrical appreciation of nature to be found in the play: “While the white moon glides from this garden; the glory of darkness returns a moment, on the cliffs of dawn” (44). Jeffers’s Judas declares that he knows Jesus is “neither God nor God’s son”; yet “you are my God” (5). Yeats’s Judas in Calvary, unlike Jeffers’s character, never doubts Christ’s divinity yet wants to be free not of his own pity but of Christ’s power, knowing that only the one who betrays God can be stronger than God. His action is thus based on desire for Nietzschean freedom of the will. Christ cannot save Judas in spite of Judas’s belief in him; Judas’s faith, not his doubt, allows him to think he can free himself through betrayal. The introductory verse in Calvary embodies the idea that the individual mesmerized by a vision cannot act. Standing in a pool abundant with prey, the white heron, under the spell of the moon and entranced by his own image in the water, is unable to fish: First musician. Motionless under the moon-beam, Up to his feathers in the stream; Although fish leap, the white heron Shivers in a dumbfounded dream. Second musician. God has not died for the white heron. Third musician. Although half famished he’ll not dare Dip or do anything but stare Upon the glittering image of a heron That now is lost and now is there. Second musician. God has not died for the white heron. (CW, 2:329–30) The “moon-crazed” heron is not the object of God’s pity, for nature has no need of salvation. The white heron afraid of its own shadow may represent not only

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the loneliness of Christ but also the loneliness of those who have rejected him in the quest for freedom. Calvary begins with the heron because the play is about loneliness: on the cross, Christ suffers exclusion (“Why hast thou forsaken me?”) from both God and human beings; Yeats’s Judas, who has rejected Christ, feels the loneliness of the Nietzschean hero. The heron may be an attitude of divinity which must endure loneliness, separated as it is from all others, or narcissism that paralyses the will; it may also represent Owen Aherne, whose name suggests “a heron,” and in “The Tables of the Law” says “I am not among those for whom Christ died” (Mythologies, 305). Aherne, like Yeats’s Judas, glimpses a vision of the eternal and cannot accept God’s forgiveness.1 Yeats’s note to Calvary indicates that he used birds as symbols of what he called the subjective life, that birds such as herons, hawks, eagles, and swans represent subjectivity. He employed his bird symbolism to intensify his portrayal of the “objective loneliness of Christ” and surrounded him with subjective men such as Judas and Lazarus who possess intellectual despair beyond Christ’s sympathy and objective men such as the Roman soldiers who are beyond his help (CW, 2:695–97). Yeats’s Christ has few speeches, none long, in a play less than a quarter the length of Jeffers’s. Like a chorus, the musicians interpret the action but take no part in it. After establishing the scene as “The road to Calvary, and I beside it / Upon an ancient stone” (CW, 2:330)2 and the time as shortly after the full moon on Good Friday,3 “The day whereon Christ dreams his passion through,” the First Musician affirms that Christ carries the cross only because he dreams it: He climbs up hither but as a dreamer climbs. The cross that but exists because He dreams it Shortens His breath and wears away His strength. The musician continues, singing O, but the mockers’ cry Makes my heart afraid, As though a flute of bone Taken from a heron’s thigh, A heron crazed by the moon, Were cleverly, softly played. (330) Christ, like the white heron, is entranced by the role he must play. Immediately the First Musician relates that the crowd shrinks before the specter of Lazarus, emblem of Christ’s power: He has a deadly face, and yet he moves Like a young foal that sees the hunt go by And races in the field. (331)

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That is, he is excited, drawn by some longing that stirs in his blood and which he cannot pursue. Christ asserts that Lazarus will not mock him because he raised Lazarus from the dead; yet Lazarus mocks Jesus more severely than the unnamed ones by saying, “You took my death, give me your death instead” (331). When Christ asserts, “I gave you life,” Lazarus answers: But death is what I ask. Alive I never could escape your love, ... You dragged me to the light as boys drag out A rabbit when they have dug its hole away; And now with all the shouting at your heels You travel towards the death I am denied. ... . . . now you will blind with light the solitude That death has made; you will disturb that corner When I had thought I might lie safe forever. (331–32) As Jeffers later did in his play, Yeats associated Christ with the imagery of light and included characters who blame Christ for willfully imposing his love.4 Lazarus in both plays hates the light and longs for death, which brings solitude and ends care and unhappiness. For him death means solace while life must be overcome. The opposite of Judas, Yeats’s Lazarus does not want to assert will but negate it. Jeffers’s Lazarus is more passive and reserved like the musicians in Calvary. Although the three Marys do not appear on stage in Calvary, their images are evoked by the First Musician, who explains that they “live but in His love” and are gathered around him. Yet the musician continues: Take but His love away, Their love becomes a feather Of eagle, swan, or gull, Or a drowned heron’s feather Tossed hither and thither Upon the bitter spray And the moon at the full. (332) They cannot love fully unless he loves them first, which withdraws from their love any act of will. While people step back before Lazarus, even the devoted women run from Judas. Christ declares that Judas has witnessed all the miracles and still doubts; yet Judas answers, like Faustus,

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I have not doubted; I knew it from the first moment that I saw you; I had no need of miracles to prove it. ... I have betrayed you Because you seemed all-powerful. (333) When Christ declares that God has put all men into his (Christ’s) power, Judas explains his action: That was the very thought that drove me wild. I could not bear to think you had but to whistle And I must do; but after that I thought, ‘Whatever man betrays him will be free’; And life grew bearable again. And now Is there a secret left I do not know, Knowing that if a man betrays a God He is the stronger of the two? (333) Christ supplies the doctrinal answer, that God planned everything, even the betrayal: “But my betrayal was decreed that hour / When the foundations of the world were laid” (333),5 meaning that Judas’s actions fulfill God’s intentions, that thus no act is committed entirely from free will. Judas responds that although the betrayal was foreordained, the identity of the betrayer was not nor the exact manner of the deed, Nor that I’d go with my old coat upon me To the High Priest, and chuckle to myself As people chuckle when alone . . . (334), recalling the image of sorcerer, trickster, witch, or scarecrow. His repetition of the word “chuckle” quotes Lazarus, who in his speech abjuring Christ’s gift of life, says “when I sickened towards my death I thought, / ‘I’ll to the desert, or chuckle in a corner, /Mere ghost, a solitary thing’” (331). Intent on affirming his own freedom of choice, like Nietzsche’s Übermensch, Judas declares I did it, I, Judas, and no other man, and now You cannot even save me. (334) Jeffers’s Judas says “I knew that you had no power to save me” (CP, 2:7) almost resignedly and sadly, while Yeats’s Judas gleefully celebrates not assurance of salvation but assurance of damnation. He would rather forfeit any possibility of salvation than forfeit his individual will; yet the fact that he is “chosen”

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(the First Roman soldier tells him) to hold up the cross in the final tableaulike scene refutes his idea that he possesses perfect freedom. Unlike Jeffers’s solitary heroes (Orestes, California, and Fayne Fraser), Yeats’s Judas does not achieve transpersonal redemption or understanding of his place in the cosmos but remains defiantly locked in his own will. The betrayal in Calvary represents combative self-assertion. Judas’s perception of Jesus—as powerful rival whose will challenges Judas’s own—subjects him to Christ’s power more than it frees Judas. The soldiers’ dialogue reveals a fundamental irony: they need nothing from Jesus, even salvation. Unlike Judas, they talk of chance, not choice,6 and accept the fate of gamblers at dice or at life: First Roman Soldier. Although but one of us can win the cloak That will not make us quarrel; what does it matter? One day one loses and the next day wins. Second Roman Soldier. Whatever happens is the best, we say, So that it’s unexpected. (334) The opposite of the traditional view of the Roman soldiers, these are good-humored and compassionate, assuring themselves that Third Roman Soldier. Had you sent A crier through the world you had not found More comfortable companions for a death-bed Than three old gamblers that have asked for nothing. (334–35) In order to entertain Jesus in his last moments, they perform the dance of the dice throwers, in which they wheel around the cross, suggesting Yeats’s system of whirling gyres of time into which the individual soul is thrown. Both musicians and soldiers speak in patterns representing variations on repetition and turning: opening and closing the play, the First Musician speaks, then the second, followed by the third, who speaks only once in each sequence; the third is followed by the second, then the first, and the cycle half turns again with the second followed by the first. The Second Musician utters only the refrains “God has not died for the white heron” at the beginning and “God has not appeared to the birds” at the end. The soldiers speak in regular turns, with first, second, and third followed by third, second, and first, like an age unwinding what the previous one has wound. Later their speeches fall into a different, though still regular, pattern: 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2.7 One soldier, believing all things to be endowed with a spirit, comments Jesus is not the god of dice. The First Roman Soldier declares, “To know that he has nothing that we need  / Must be a comfort to him” (335), enhancing the irony, for a dying person does not need to fear being robbed. Their drawing lots for the cloak merely increases Christ’s isolation and loneliness. He is no communal man because his solicitude for the masses does

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not make him one with them but does make him one of Yeats’s “objective” men because his thoughts are turned toward humankind. The final verses reaffirm the theme of self-destruction in the quest to achieve self-affirmation or freedom of the will. Judas explains that, when he planned the betrayal, there was nothing near him but a heron “So full of itself that it seemed terrified” (333). The heron crazed by the moon suggests both betrayer and betrayed (Judas and Christ), who are turned inward on themselves so that they are bent even on their own self-destruction, affirming both as solitary men, neither possessing freedom of will. Dear Judas examines the destructive power of love, pity, and self-sacrifice as well as archetypes of betrayer and savior, isolated hero and communal man as they reenact passions too strong to be forgotten even in death. In this play both Jesus and Judas are far more complex, nuanced, and humanly vulnerable than the archetypes Yeats put onstage. In the end Jeffers’s Lazarus points the audience toward that which truly will endure—inhuman nature, the “white moon” and the “cliffs of dawn” (CP, 2:44) wherein lies true salvation. Calvary also concludes with images pointing the reader back to the natural world from which truth emanates, the empty lake from which the cygnets have flown (like the swans in “The Wild Swans at Coole” needing only other swans) and the ger-eagle (its name suggesting the cycles of history)8 rising “In blue deep of the upper air / Where one-eyed day can meet his stare,” unconscious of itself and content with its “savage heart” (CW, 2:335). Only human beings seek God for their own selfaffirmation, but, according to these dramatic works, they do so in vain.

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5. Rationalism and the Great Memory of the World Jeffers shared with Yeats a belief in what Yeats called Spiritus Mundi and Jeffers called Anima Mundi, the Great Memory, or universal consciousness. The existence of this Great Memory or buried consciousness of the world, which includes individual, cultural, and natural history and manifests itself to individuals through images and archetypes remained for Jeffers as well as Yeats among certain truths that superseded reason. Yeats’s Spiritus Mundi connected all peoples who understood their different myths in the same universal way; Jeffers’s Great Memory is the essence or life force of the physical world. Yeats believed that certain ideas, themes, and archetypes were innate and did not come entirely from sense perception. Jeffers on the other hand emphasized sense perception and hence “objective fact” in order to know the majesty of the world, but he rejected empiricism, which claims that sense perception is the sole way human beings know anything. Yeats wrote in “Hodos Cameliontos” (1922) that revelation came to an individual from an “age-long memoried self ” and that genius was a “crisis that joins that buried self for certain moments to our trivial daily mind” (CW, 3:216–17). Yeats’s Great Memory or Spiritus Mundi dwelled largely in the unconscious. Its symbols came from the natural world, but individual and cultural memories were as important as instinct and the history of the land itself. Jeffers further believed in the existence of a buried sensibility contained in the physical and biological processes of the earth that at times (usually when the human mind was inspired by natural beauty and power) rose into individual consciousness. Thus even though he considered human beings to be spoilers and desecrators of the natural world, he considered them also physically and spiritually part of that world—its consciousness of itself—and therefore important to it. Jeffers identified this Great Memory with the physical world, not with a spirit

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located within but separate from it: “I believe that the universe is one being,” he wrote in a letter (qtd. in Karman, introduction, 9), “all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, influencing each other, therefore parts of one organic whole.” Belief in this great storehouse of images caused Yeats and Jeffers to distrust Enlightenment emphasis on human reason and sense perception as the only ways of knowing the world. They might be called antirationalists and antiempiricists both in their belief in a buried consciousness and in their conviction that Enlightenment rationalism, which led to industrialism, also led to modern desolation. Although Jeffers has been called a rational poet inspired by science, “the ultimate criterion of what is and what is not” (Brophy, “Jeffers’s ‘Apology for Bad Dreams’ Revisited,” 4), his belief in the primacy of the physical world and in the ability of science to dispel anthropocentrism is not synonymous with Enlightenment rationalism. Born of Newtonian scientific thinking, rationalism made the supreme mistake (in Jeffers’s view) of declaring human beings—because they are able to ponder issues of cosmological and causal significance—the center of the universe and the primary measure of its importance. Yeats also found distasteful the philosophy of empiricism—particularly that of John Locke—to which he attributed both the death of belief in the supernatural and the materialism of the Industrial Revolution. In “Fragments” (1928) Yeats made clear his skepticism: I Locke sank into a swoon; The Garden died; God took the spinning-jenny Out of his side. II Where got I that truth? Out of a medium’s mouth, Out of nothing it came, Out of the forest loam, Out of the dark night where lay The crowns of Nineveh. (CW, 1:214) Part 1 thus parodies the creation account in Genesis by showing that Locke’s philosophy did not create woman but rather spawned a machine. In the process “The Garden died”—empiricism and the ensuing industrialism destroyed paradise. What Yeats meant here may be that Enlightenment empiricism and emphasis on human reason rendered belief in myth impossible or perhaps put an end to literary pastoralism or Romanticism. For Yeats spiritual presences could make known to the individual truths from the other realm. Thus innate

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ideas—which John Locke asserted do not exist—make manifest this other world. Locke’s “common-sense” philosophy—his belief that rationally grounded judgments, especially those based on sense perception, should prevail over expressions of emotion—as well as his denial of the existence of innate ideas prompted Yeats to condemn Locke’s philosophy soundly, attributing to it both the death of religious myth (“the Garden died”) and the birth of the Industrial Revolution and its attendant movement toward mechanization (“God took the spinningjenny / Out of his side”). For Yeats love of reason, such as Locke’s philosophy implies, separates human beings from nature and the collective unconscious, from which emanate the images that make great art possible. Yeats titled the poem “Fragments” not only because of their cryptic nature but also because he believed Locke had fragmented human understanding with his theory of the primary and secondary qualities of objects in the world and his denial of innate knowledge. At the outset Yeats’s poem proclaims that Locke “sank,” implying that the empiricist fell to a lower state—he sinned or became separated from God—rather than that God brought about the philosopher’s unconscious state. Yeats’s poem also employs “swoon”—one of John Keats’s words in “Bright Star!”—rather than the King James Bible’s “deep sleep,” which God caused to “fall upon” Adam (Genesis 2.21). Thus Yeats found the inception of the Industrial Revolution in Locke’s philosophy. In his essay on Bishop George Berkeley (1931), Yeats described Berkeley’s disagreement with the philosophy of England—and Newton and Locke in particular. Among “certain great constructions” created by Locke, his articulation of the primary and secondary qualities (refuted by Berkeley) led to the idea that things could be separated from their characteristics—“from that day to this the conception of a physical world without colour, sound, taste, tangibility . . . has remained the assumption of science” (“Bishop Berkeley,” CW, 5:106)—and to the dialectical materialism of European socialism (106). Berkeley—like Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, and Edmund Burke—found in England the opposite that “stung their own thought into expression and made it lucid” (107). Yeats’s conclusion laments the end of the Romantic movement and the advent of an age in which human beings thought and created only from their own individual minds and not from a culture collectively understood (109). The irony of the first part of “Fragments” gives way to the satiric second part, which begins with a reflexive question that subverts modern syntax as well as modern logic: “Where got I that truth?” Yeats obtained it in part from William Blake, who declared in “Milton” that he would “cast off Rational Demonstration” and “Bacon, Locke, and Newton” and in “Jerusalem” told the reader to “behold the loom of Locke,” the cruel wheels on which the Industrial Revolution moved. Yeats asserted that he obtained this “truth” from a medium—one who connected the natural and supernatural worlds from “nothing” (perhaps the

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Great Memory); from the “forest loam” (natural processes), or from the “dark night where lay  / The crowns of Nineveh”—myth. In “Hodos Chameliontos” (1920), while examining the characteristics that create a national consciousness, Yeats’s persona asks “Was not a nation, as distinguished from a crowd of chance comers, bound together by this interchange among streams or shadows; that Unity of Image, which I sought in national literature, being but an originating symbol?” (CW, 3:210). Concluding that truth would come not from books but from a moment of passionate experience akin to what he felt when writing poetry (215), Yeats knew himself “face to face with the Anima Mundi described by Platonic philosophers, and more especially in modern times by Henry More, which has a memory independent of embodied individual memories, though they constantly enrich it with their images and their thoughts” (210). His observations of tame birds building nests confirmed for him the existence of the buried consciousness of the world, which endows creatures with instincts and people with innate ideas that come from something inaccessible or inexplicable through reason (215–17). Although Robinson Jeffers did not condemn Locke specifically as Yeats did, in “Metamorphosis” he concluded stanza 1 with the assertion “The Harlot Goddess of Reason— / I mean desolation’s handmaid—inherits all.” The poetpersona begins with a declaration of the earth’s beauty and strength: The beauty of the earth is a resilient wonderful thing, It dies and lives, it is capable of many resurrections . . . (CP, 3:417) Describing a canyon that was once “a hushed and holy place” where redwood trees had towered “for a thousand years, and for a million their ancestors, / In their own sacred twilight,” he states that human beings destroyed the canyon’s dignity and virtue by cutting down the trees. The location is now “one of the cursed places” and is “A temple profaned and atheist.” In Jeffers’s philosophy, while sense perception reveals the beauty of nature and makes possible the discovery of scientific truth that invalidates anthropocentrism, overreliance on human reason (scientific rationalism) separates human beings from nature and leads to destruction of it. Locke was an empiricist in that he believed all knowledge to be supplied by sense perception and introspection (Copleston, 70), a rationalist in that he believed all questions could be answered by human reason. He put forth his doctrine of “tabula rasa,” the blank page, on which “experience alone can write” and which enabled people to believe each individual entirely free from what has already happened (Laslett, 83). Certainly Locke advanced the principle that there exists no “innate knowledge,” titling book 1 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding “Neither Principles nor Ideas Are Innate,” and proceeding to declare in chapter 1 (titled “No Innate Speculative Principles”): “No proposition can be

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said to be in the mind which it never yet knew, which it was never yet conscious of ” (40). Alexander Campbell Fraser noted that this argument preempts any idea of the unconscious, collective or otherwise: The argument in this section assumes that ideas cannot be held mentally in a latent or unconscious state, that there cannot be impressions made on the mind without accompanying consciousness of them, a mental impression and a consciousness of it being regarded as identical. That there may be conditions, implied in the constitution of reason, to which our ideas, when they do emerge in consciousness, must conform, by necessity of reason, is a conception foreign to his view. Locke argues that no idea can be said to be “in the mind” of which that mind is not either actually percipient, or through memory capable of becoming percipient. (Fraser, 40–41n2) Consequently Locke’s philosophy contradicts the idea that all people share in a common mythological heritage imbibed intuitively, not learned through experience. In book 4, “Of Knowledge and Probability,” but especially in chapters 4, 9, 10, and 11, Locke laid out his theory that human beings know things from experience alone and explicitly from the experience of sense perception: The knowledge of the existence of any other thing [other than God] we can have only by sensation: for there being no necessary connexion of real existence with any idea a man hath in his memory; nor of any other existence but that of God with the existence of any particular man: no particular man can know the existence of any other being, but only when, by actual operating upon him, it makes itself perceived by him. (325) He added that knowledge can come only from the senses: “It is therefore the actual receiving of ideas from without that gives us notice of the existence of other things, and makes us know, that something doth exist at that time without us, which causes that idea in us . . .” (326). Although Locke did not deny spiritual reality or supernatural order—firmly asserting his belief in and founding many of his principles on Christian theology—Yeats found Locke’s denial of innate principles to be spiritually sterile. Part 2 of “Fragments” asserts that Yeats’s own truth does come from “nothing,” and therefore truth can emanate from nothing. Locke’s philosophy furthermore led to economic pragmatism and materialism, which spurred the Industrial Revolution that both Yeats and Jeffers abhorred. In the Second Treatise of Government (also known as book 2 of An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government), Locke put forth his idea that all improvement of human society has come from human desire to increase “conveniencys” of life. The desire to increase these conveniences makes men (Locke’s term) want to improve land in order to obtain them. Because the produce of land is perishable, human beings created money, which is

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not; as a result of the creation of imperishable means of exchange, they desired to increase their productivity, which resulted in more perishable goods—in order to acquire money by which they could obtain “conveniences.” Through their productivity they thus benefitted all humankind: That in the beginning, before the desire of having more than Men needed, had altered the intrinsick value of things, which depends only on their usefulness to the Life of Man . . . To which let me add, that he who appropriates land to himself by his labour, does not lessen but increase the common stock of mankind. . . . And therefor he, that incloses Land and has a greater plenty of the conveniencys of life from ten acres, than he could have from an hundred left to Nature, may truly be said, to give ninety acres to Mankind. (312) Locke referred to people who did not wish to acquire more than they needed as living in a “state of Nature” and dismissed any possible value for land that is not cultivated. He also believed large human populations preferable to largeness of dominions (315). He termed all America “a State of Nature” (295) and its uncultivated land “waste” (317): labour makes the far greatest part of the value of things, we enjoy in this World: And the ground which produces the materials, is scarce to be reckon’d in, as any, or at most, but a very small, part of it; . . . Land that is left wholly to Nature . . . is called, as indeed it is, wast; and we shall find the benefit of it amount to little more than nothing. This shews, how much numbers of men are to be preferd to largenesse of dominions. . . . (315) For Yeats, land contained historic, mythological, and literary significance that far transcended any material value. Since he disliked industrialism, mechanization, and utilitarianism, Yeats would have found Locke’s theory of value loathsome as he seems to indicate in “Fragments.” Although Yeats wrote, in entry 21 of Pages from a Diary 1930, that cultivation of land is a duty of land ownership (Explorations, 312) and that rights spring from accomplishing one’s duty, he was speculating not on the value of land but on tradition and inherited responsibilities. In addition, while he did not express the same love of wilderness as Jeffers, Yeats found many of his poetic symbols in the natural world and embraced the idea that Ireland should remain a rural, pastoral country in which people did not seek primarily to increase their material possessions but lived according to tradition. Even more soundly than Yeats, Jeffers denounced industrialism, mechanization, and “progress.” “The Coast-Road” (1937) describes his philosophy of the best life as active, solitary, and close to nature. In “Shine, Republic” (1935) he declared his conviction that poverty and freedom should go together but do

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not because Americans have fallen in love with luxuries. Here he departed from Locke; while the philosopher believed in individual freedom to increase one’s possessions, the poet believed in individual freedom to live in and love the natural world. He certainly would not have agreed with Locke that numbers of human beings are to be desired more than land. Jeffers believed people and their society to be the worst part of the world, albeit an insignificant part; he would definitely not have agreed that land left to itself was “waste” since he valued wilderness more than civilization, and the only “entrepreneurs” he respected were the small farmers and ranchers who eked out their livings from the land, not those who increased their “conveniences,” which were not only unnecessary but created dependence and hence weakness. Love of luxury had made the freedomloving Americans weak and timid, and thus the desire for what Locke called “conveniencys” had not contributed anything of value to society. Yeats as well as Jeffers identified the Great Memory with nature and believed that imaginative supremacy emanated from the collective, describing in his essay “Magic” (1900) “the power of many minds to become one, overpowering one another by spoken words and by unspoken thought till they have become a single intense, unhesitating energy” (CW, 4:30). Since the Great Memory was particularly associated with place and the heritage of a people, artists—in order to bring the universal consciousness to individual understanding—must draw from their own ancestral literature; for example, Keats’s and Shakespeare’s knowledge of folklore made them greater than Shelley and Blake, who took their symbols from other cultural mythologies or created their own.1 In “Ireland and the Arts” (1901) Yeats claimed that Irish history and literature possessed an abundance of imaginative events and legends that were surpassed only by those of ancient Greece for wild beauty. Every mountain in Ireland, as in Greece, was associated with some tale; therefore Irish artists should “fix upon their memory the appearance of mountains and rivers and make it all visible again in their arts” (CW, 4:152). In order to create a national literature, poets must have access to symbols, archetypes, and stories found only in the folk imagination: “No conscious invention can take the place of tradition, for he who would write a folk tale, and thereby bring a new life into literature, must have the fatigue of the spade in his hands and the stupor of the fields in his heart” (“The Message of the Folk-lorist,” 1893, CW, 9:212–13). The folk—illiterate or semiliterate peasants, tinkers, and fishermen—possessed, Yeats claimed in “By the Roadside” (1901), a popular imaginative tradition that connected artists to their own cultural history: “There is no song or story handed down among the cottages that has not words and thoughts to carry one as far, for though one can know but a little of their ascent, one knows that they ascend like mediaeval genealogies through unbroken dignities to the beginning of the world” (Mythologies, 138–39). Yeats wrote in “Away” (1902), he had not yet lost the belief that he would come to

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understand, in some far away village or island that had not lost its tradition, “how this pagan mystery hides and reveals some half-forgotten memory of an ancient knowledge or of an ancient wisdom” (CW, 10:73). Folklore could do more than connect the artist with the past, important for the revivification of Irish traditions. Artists needed to know the mythological and legendary images and symbols because the act of creation itself involved remembering images of past greatness stored in a universal memory—what Yeats called the “fibrous darkness” out of which all ideas sprang. Folklore not only united people spiritually to their own localities but also expressed universal themes: “The root-stories of the Greek poets are told to-day at the cabin fires of Donegal . . .” (“The Message of the Folk-lorist,” CW, 9:210). The same Irish mind produced the old sagas as well as folklore (Thuente, W. B. Yeats and Irish Folklore, 24); furthermore the great myths of Ireland expressed not only Irish history but also the collective imagination of the world, the Spiritus Mundi—similar to Carl Gustav Jung’s Anima Mundi, the collective unconscious described in Yeats’s essay “Magic” (1900): I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are— (1) That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy. (2) Th  at the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself. (3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols. (CW, 4:25) Artistic vision stemmed from “buried memories,” symbols from the inherited psychic past. In “The Message of the Folk-lorist,” Yeats wrote, “There is no passion, no vague desire, no tender longing that cannot find fit type or symbol in the legends of the peasantry or in the traditions of the scalds and the gleemen” (CW, 9:210). Human experience throughout the ages was part of the Great Memory, which became manifest to people through myth, folklore, and legend: Whatever the passions of man have gathered about, becomes a symbol in the great memory, and in the hands of him who has the secret it is a worker of wonders, a caller-up of angels or of devils. The symbols are of all kinds, for everything in heaven or earth has its association, momentous or trivial, in the great memory. . . . (“Magic,” CW, 4:39)

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Artists sought to remake the world but could do so only according to the patterns and impulses of the Great Mind. The soul was “individual” only in its temporal manifestation; it also remained part of universal and historical truth. Yeats wrote of the natural universal divine in Whitmanesque terms: To the greater poets everything they see has its relation to the national life, and through that to the universal and divine life: nothing is an isolated ar­­ tistic moment; there is unity everywhere; everything fulfills a purpose that is not its own; the hailstone is a journeyman of God; the grass blade carries the universe upon its point. . . . The Irish peasant and most serene of Englishmen are at one. Tradition is always the same. The earliest poet of India and the Irish peasant in his hovel nod to each other across the ages, and are in perfect agreement. (New Island, 174, 204) Thus, by contemplating nature and traditional ways of life, the poet understands their relation to the universal and divine. Neither the imagination nor the act of creation is solitary. They are collective because great art makes manifest the relationship of the individual to the universal. In “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry” (1903) Yeats articulated his theory that the Great Memory serves as storehouse of poetic symbols, which do not originate in the individual imagination but the universal consciousness: Nor I think has anyone, who has known that experience [the mystical state of the soul] with any constancy, failed to find some day, in some old book or on some old monument, a strange or intricate image, that had floated up before him, and to grow perhaps dizzy with the sudden conviction that our little memories are but a part of some great memory that renews the world and men’s thoughts age after age, and that our thoughts are not, as we suppose, the deep but a little foam upon the deep. Shelley understood this . . . but whether he understood that the great memory is also a dwellinghouse of symbols, of images that are living souls, I cannot tell. (CW, 4:61) Later, in the second section of Per Amica Silentia Lunae, titled “Anima Mundi” (1917), Yeats explained, “Our daily thought was certainly but the line of foam at the shallow edge of a vast luminous sea” (CW, 5:18). Examining the philosopher Henry More’s conception of Anima Mundi, Yeats explained, “I came to believe in a great memory passing on from generation to generation” (18), and “Our animal spirits or vehicles are but as it were a condensation of the vehicle of Anima Mundi, and give substance to its images in the faint materialisation of our common thought . . .” (21). Even the emotions were not individual but part of a vast scheme: “We carry to Anima Mundi our memory, and that memory is for a time our external world; and all passionate moments recur again and again, for passion desires its own recurrence more than any event . . .” (24).

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James Olney explained in “Sex and the Dead: Daimones of Yeats and Jung” that for both Yeats and Jung the Great Memory was the storehouse of the “residue of experience” that becomes manifest to the individual in the form of powerful images that cause that individual to re-create a vision of the world in terms of those images: When an archetype takes hold of us (nor can we avoid possession by them since we are human and possessed of all the instincts specific to humans), then—as Yeats and Jung jointly maintain—events of the day do not (as in Freud) determine the images of our dreams nor does experience in the world determine our vision; rather our vision breaks the world and reforms it according to an image that comes from deep within and from far in the past. An instinct insistently forces its own self-portrait on us, and it is not—nor will it ever be—the portrait of anyone in the world; so that all our Freudian incestuous desires—Yeats and Jung agree—are deeper and other than the son’s desire for his mother or the brother’s for his sister. They are nothing less than the serpent’s closing on his own tail, Antaeus returning to the earth, the self wedding the anti-self in a hieros gamos, Narcissus joined to his daimonic image, Leda’s Egg turning inside out and outside in without ever breaking the shell. The figures of such visions and dreams, Yeats one place declares, are ‘shadows of the impulses that have made them, messages . . . out of the ancestral being of the questioner’ (Essays, 36). Another way—less poetic but more psychological—of saying this is that such visionary and dream figures are self-portraits of specifically human instincts which are themselves the inherited product of the accumulated experience of the race. In yet other words, they are archetypal images from the collective unconscious, symbolic figures from Anima Mundi, daimones reflecting the cumulative experience and psychic possibilities of humankind and, at the same time, shaping that experience and those possibilities. (222) In “The Second Coming” (1920), the only poem in which Yeats used the term “Spiritus Mundi,” the speaker anticipates the advent not of Christ but of Antichrist, the “rough beast” that will bring forth an era of violence—as Michael Wood wrote, not mere disorder but “a new degree of uncontrollable violence and a new realm of impunity” (Yeats and Violence, 216). Just as the two previous eras (two thousand-year cycles) had commenced with miraculous births (that of Helen and that of Christ), so would the next, although of course the result would be disastrous. The image that “troubles” the poet’s sight—that of a sphinx in the desert becoming animated although its gaze is “blank and pitiless as the sun” (CW, 1:187)—comes from the Great Memory, the universal storehouse of images, to foretell a cataclysmic change of historical phase.2

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Jung believed that the almost universal parallelism between mythological motifs provides evidence that archetypes grew from the collective ancestral experience. Myths, he concluded, express the nature of the soul: “Primitive man impresses us so strongly with his subjectivity that we should really have guessed long ago that myths refer to something psychic” (Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 6). Since they are allegories of psychic processes, myths cannot be invented. In describing his theory of Collective Unconscious or Anima Mundi, Jung proposed the existence of two layers of the unconscious, the personal and the transpersonal or collective: “There are present in every individual, besides his personal memories, the great ‘primordial’ images .  .  . the inherited possibilities of human imagination as it was from time immemorial. The fact of this inheritance explains the truly amazing phenomenon that certain motifs from myths and legends repeat themselves the world over in identical forms” (Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 64). The personal unconscious is individual and subjective, while the collective unconscious is universal and objective: “the collective unconscious is anything but an incapsulated personal system; it is sheer objectivity, as wide as the world and open to all the world. There I am the object of every subject, in complete reversal of my ordinary consciousness, where I am always the subject that has an object. There I am utterly one with the world, so much a part of it that I forget all too easily who I really am” (Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 22). The greatest thoughts of humankind are shaped by what Jung called “dominants” or “archetypes” of the collective unconscious, which, although they cannot be personified, are independent and express the recurrent experiences of humanity: “The archetype is a kind of readiness to produce over and over again the same or similar mythical ideas. Hence it seems as though what is impressed upon the unconscious were exclusively the subjective fantasy-images aroused by the physical process. We may therefore assume that the archetypes are recurrent impressions made by subjective reactions” (Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 69). That Jeffers was aware of Jung and the concept of the great storehouse of images is clear from his reference to “the great memory of that unhumanized world” in “Subjected Earth” (1931, CP, 2:129) and in a late manuscript retitled “Anima Mundi,” which was left unfinished at his death. Throughout his career his conviction that the beauty of the world is the proper subject for poetry did not change, but as Steven Chapman argued in “‘De Rerum Virtute’: A Critical Anatomy,” Jeffers’s later poetry gives voice to a more fully developed view of both nature and humankind “encompassing ethics, aesthetics, and religion” (22) and moving from his earlier stance of human insignificance to a more generous view of the place of human beings in the world. Jeffers moved from the hatred of human self-awareness he expressed in the early poem “Consciousness” (1926)

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to appreciation of its importance for the Great Memory in “De Rerum Virtute” (1953) and later poems such as “Anima Mundi.” The three parts of “Consciousness” (1926) articulate Jeffers’s conviction that human self-awareness separates individuals from the natural world to which the speaker wishes to belong. Through the use of English sonnet form Jeffers paid deference to the high Renaissance expression of courtly love; here, however, the speaker’s feelings are directed toward nature, and his inadequacy stems from limitations imposed by his humanity, not from desire for a beautiful woman. In the first section the speaker considers the separation between instinct and will, describing the human being acting on impulse: “What catches the eye the quick hand reaches toward / Or plotting brain circuitously secures, / The will is not required, is not our lord” (CP, 1:7). A metaphor of the rifle and bullet (“The bullet flies the way the rifle’s fired”) reveals the unconsciously mechanistic nature of the impulse or instinct as well as its deadly earnestness. In the following rhetorical question, however, the speaker poses the quintessential dilemma: “Then what is this unreasonable excess, / Our needless quality, this unrequired / Exception in the world, this consciousness?” He cries out against what the Renaissance and Enlightenment celebrated—individual sensibility as avatar of God and human reason that could enable people to unlock the secrets of the universe. For Jeffers this quality was not to be held up as evidence of human superiority but to be reviled. The speaker’s calling it “unreasonable” as well as “needless” and “unrequired,” stands in contrast to Enlightenment pride in this human faculty. Jeffers recognized that although consciousness stems from the same source as instinct (“Our nerves and brain have their own chemic changes”), sensibility “surely . . . stands outside.” The metaphor of consciousness as a horse illuminates its connection to the natural world: “It feeds in the same pasture and it ranges / Up and down the same hills, but unallied,  / However symbiotic, with the cells  / That weave tissues and lives.” The couplet closes with a simple declarative statement— “It is something else”—and while for centuries people celebrated this difference between human and animal being, the poem makes clear that Jeffers abhorred it. The description of separateness in the first part does not satisfy, however; the reader needs a more fully stated argument. The second sonnet begins with a sentence fragment proposing Jeffers’s pantheistic view of the universe: “As if there were two Gods.” The description of the first, the creator of the natural world, contains some of the most beautiful lyrics in the poem, alternating between iambs, trochees, and anapests, all full end rhyme with one exception (“men” / “brain”) and that slant rhyme carefully chosen to connect human beings with that which engenders the great separation between them and nature— their unusual brain. Line 2, however, equates human beings with the wonders of nature by means of the conjunction “and” together with strong stresses accen­ tuating “All visible things, waves, mountains, stars and men,” followed by the

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more impressionistic and mysterious qualities of nature that inspire our perception—“The sweet forms dancing on through flame and shade,” reminiscent of Yeats’s imagery in The Rose, introductory verses to The Shadowy Waters, and The Wanderings of Oisin. The speaker then turns to the description of the body, revealing not only Jeffers’s knowledge of physiology but also his understanding that science reveals human beings to be more a part of the natural world than Renaissance or Enlightenment philosophy could ever acknowledge: The swift messenger nerves that sting the brain, The brain itself and the answering strands that start Explosion in the muscles, the indrinking eye Of cunning crystal, the hands and feet, the heart And feeding entrails, and the organs that tie The generations into one wreath, one strand. (CP, 1:7) The repetition of “strand” within five lines emphasizes the interconnectedness of the individual nerve with the generations of all living things (a theme Jeffers returned to in “De Rerum Virtute”) and the image of the wreath signifies the unity of all things. As in stanza 1, the speaker acknowledges the importance of the chemical processes but at the same time the tangible world that he loves so much. For all their complexity, human beings nevertheless need only “brain or patience to understand”; the use of the singular form of the verb “needs” again suggests unity of the mental and physical worlds. The last three lines, however, shatter the love of the world felt by this creature mankind with the introduction of “the other God,” who arrives suddenly, declaring its sovereignty to uplift or despise, to “crown” or “damn,” to add a “different fire” to the existence of the forms. The last line utters a curse: “These forms shall feel, ache, love, grieve, and be glad,” suggesting that the “sweet forms” of the earlier line which danced “through flame and shade” were human beings. Emotions and awareness, however, have cast the innocent natural beings out of Eden. The last sonnet dwells on human life after the expulsion from Eden. Jeffers’s persona returns to the “insolence” of this God or devil, who brings not only the “sting” but also the “rapture,” and asks, evoking Greek pantheism and Prometheus in particular, “By what right did that fire-bringer come in?” As the consciousness is “needless,” the second God is “uncalled for,” a conqueror who enslaves beings and brings both joy and misery. With the second quatrain the speaker shows the result of humankind’s loss of innocence but also the triumph of human consciousness; we are divided in our allegiance to each God, and the second God allows us to realize the profundity of the beauty of the world: suddenly An August sundown on a mountain road

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The marble pomps, the primal majesty And senseless beauty of that austerer God Come to us, so we love him as men love A mountain, not their kind: (CP, 1:8). Even as we love the world, however, we grow aware of ourselves and the nature of our existence, outcast from the garden of our innocence: love growing intense Changes to joy that we grow conscious of: There is the rapture, the sting, the insolence, . . . . . Or mourn dead beauty a bird-bright-May-morning: The insufferable insolence, the sting. (CP, 1:8) The quality that allows us to love and appreciate nature also alienates us from it; our joy is our misery, our freedom our captivity. Thus he reveals the double, impure nature of human life. Jeffers’s belief in the existence of a Great Memory of the natural world that supersedes reason lies behind his conviction that human beings are not masters of the earth but part of it as the narrator in Roan Stallion (1925) declares: Humanity is the start of the race; I say Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire, The atom to be split. (CP, 1:189) Fooled by desire (love) and science (intellect) into believing that they are the masters of the world, people are actually miniscule beings in the great universe: “what is humanity in this cosmos?” the narrator asks (CP, 1:189), posing the question Jeffers continued to answer throughout his work. Central to Jeffers’s philosophy, and not necessarily to the deep ecologists, is the poet’s conviction that human beings are not only not the fallen angels of the traditional religious view but also one of the worst creatures—an aberration, a mistake of evolution. At times Jeffers referred to them with scorn, sometimes with pity, and sometimes with reluctant admiration. “Orca” (1947) calls the human species a “botched experiment” as the speaker watches a killer whale devour a sea lion, but not with the ugliness and hypocrisy of human beings: Here was death, and with terror, yet it looked clean and bright, it was beautiful. Why? Because there was nothing human involved, suffering nor causing; no lies, no smirk and no malice;

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All strict and decent; the will of man had nothing to do here. The earth is a star, its human element Is what darkens it. War is evil, the peace will be evil, cruelty is evil; death is not evil. But the breed of man Has been queer from the start. It looks like a botched experiment that has run wild and ought to be stopped. (CP, 3:206) Still, human beings have the power to realize the beauty of nature and their place in it. Jeffers stated in many poems that they should not separate themselves from nature but should instead abandon what is conscious and human—therefore temporary, transitory, and ugly. “The Answer” (1937) implies a readership, an inquiring presence aware of his earlier work and “answers” the question of how people, imperfect as they are, should live: Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man Apart from that . . . (CP, 2:536) The poem thus conveys that human beings can separate themselves from their own narcissism by contemplation of and immersion in nature. Jeffers also instructed the reader in “Sign-Post” (1935) how to transcend human failings and narcissism: Civilized, crying how to be human again: this will tell you how. Turn outward, love things, not men, turn right away from humanity, Let that doll lie. Consider if you like how the lilies grow, Lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinity Make your veins cold, look at the silent stars, let your eyes Climb the great ladder out of the pit of yourself and man. Things are so beautiful, your love will follow your eyes; Things are the God, you will love God, and not in vain, For what we love, we grow to it, we share its nature. At length You will look back along the stars’ rays and see that even The poor doll humanity has a place under heaven. Its qualities repair their mosaic around you, the chips of strength And sickness; but now you are free, even to become human, But born of the rock and the air, not of a woman. (CP, 2:418) Thus, although they are ignoble and prone to self-absorption as well as cruelty, people can “become human”—that is, realize their nobler natures. This sonnet combines Italian and English rhyme and progression: an octave rhymed

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ababcdcd, a sestet rhymed efgefg with a volta beginning only at the end of line 9, and a couplet as well as sestet, both syntactically and rhetorically self-contained. The allusion to the biblical verse in which Christ admonishes his people to “Consider the lilies how they grow” (Luke 12:27) turns the table on that passage, for while Christ taught his hearers to leave concern for the moment’s well-being and turn to the spirit, Jeffers advised his readers to leave the spiritual and return to the earth. James Baird explained how Jeffers’s philosophy that we discover our humanness by realizing the fullness of our relationship with nature replaces anthropocentrism with what is now called ecocentrism (“Robinson Jeffers and the Deep Ecologists,” 8). One of Jeffers’s most lyric poems, “Continent’s End” (1924), claims humanity to be one with nature, declaring that the “tides are in our veins” and yet the ocean and sentient life are both descended from the “tides of fire,” “the older fountain” (CP, 1:16–17). John Elder asserted that in “Continent’s End” Jeffers worked in the tradition of Wordworth’s “Intimations” ode, where the speaker maintains that the sun’s eye has kept watch over mankind’s mortality (20). People are not the center of the universe but one of many parts, which together make up a beautiful whole; the only beauty they can discover lies in their consciousness of the physical universe, not in their desires, intellect, or creations. Whether they know it or not, their existence is connected to the Great Memory of the earth. R. Ellis Roberts on the other hand pointed out that Jeffers’s philosophy resembles Lucretius’s pantheism (“Lonely Eminence,” 147) but not that of Wordsworth—which Arthur Coffin described as simply the assurance of God’s benign presence in the world of nature (250)—or of Whitman, who like Wordsworth embraced a much more anthropocentric view. Coffin also examined in detail the significant influence of the Latin poet Lucretius on Jeffers (242–52). In his lengthy, didactic poem De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things), Lucretius drew from Epicurus’s belief in the atomic basis of all substance, denial of the existence of a god or gods that concern themselves with human affairs, the “theory of the exclusive validity of sense perception” as the only reliable source of knowledge or truth (seemingly prefiguring Locke), and “an ethical doctrine that pleasure was the criterion of the good,” pain of evil (Copley, ix–x). What Epicurus meant by pleasure, however, was no hedonistic notion: pleasure is “the natural and normal state of being, the product of properly balanced and integrated atomic structure; pain results from loss of balance and structural harmony” (Copley, xiii). When he asserted the primacy of sense perception in determining truth, he did so in order to refute religious teaching, unlike Locke. Epicureanism constituted a philosophy of peace rather than exhilaration; consequently Epicurus tolerated religious cults and even advocated that his followers take part in religious ceremonies—but only to contemplate serenity and not with any expectation of winning the gods’ approval. Lucretius, on the other hand, adopted the harsher view that religion

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was an ignorant, viciously distorted view of the world: “For true knowledge, humanity should turn away from the perversions and distortions of religion to the actuality of the world, its outer appearance and its inward laws” (Copley, xvii). Early in De Rerum Natura Lucretius declared his purpose: For I shall tell you of the highest law of heaven and god, and show you basic substance, whence nature creates all things and gives them growth, and whither again dissolves them at their death . . . (2) And he forcefully articulates his contempt for religion: “human life lay foul before men’s eyes,  / crushed to the dust beneath religion’s weight. . .” (2). His example of the foulness of religious influence is the sacrifice of Iphianassa (Iphigenaia) by her father, Agamemnon, “So much of evil could religion prompt” (3). From his diatribe against religion, Lucretius proceeded to articulate Epicurus’s principle that “nothing was ever by miracle made from nothing” (4). Lucretius instructs his readers in a form of what modern science would call the law of conservation of matter, the belief that the universe contains a limited number of atoms that could neither be created nor destroyed. His speaker explains, Things seem to perish, then, but they do not: nature builds one from another, and lets no thing be born unless another helps by dying. Come now: I’ve shown that things cannot be made from nothing nor, once made, be brought to nothing. (7) While the universe (“the sum of things”) was infinite and indestructible (7n5), however, the world (earth) was finite and subject to death. For Lucretius, the soul lives only in the body and is dissolved into the elements after death (Copley, xvii). Jeffers similarly believed that human beings were part of nature and that after death they return to the earth. In “Inscription for a Gravestone” (1931), for example, the dead man proclaims “now I am part of the beauty” (CP, 2:125). Like Lucretius, Jeffers rejected formal religion, but unlike Lucretius he retained his faith in a creator although not in a personal God. According to Coffin, “Jeffers’s logic is simple enough: he accepted the atomic theory of Lucretius, but if God created the atoms which are present in all things, then by the act of creation all things are by extension divine” (Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Inhumanism, 248). If God were manifest in nature, Jeffers reasoned, then to recognize the beauty in nature is to reverence God. Jeffers followed Epicurus in believing in the integrity of sense perception, but he also confirmed the necessity of experiencing God through perception of nature (as in “Sign-Post”).

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As he rejected the separation between God and nature, Jeffers similarly repudiated anthropocentrism. The last lines of “Carmel Point” (1954) make clear that he believed human happiness possible only by conceiving of self and understanding as part of nature: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from. (CP, 3.399) Human beings could return to their better selves by realizing they were part of nature, by ceasing to insist on separation from the unconscious. The human tendency to interpret all nature in anthropocentric terms, on the other hand, Jeffers called frailty. As the eye itself fails because of age or disease it begins to see human figures—a rock looks like a man’s face; a tree warped by storm and surrounded by fog is a man running; a huddle of bedclothes is a woman dying. For the eyes are human: “to see the human figure in all things is man’s disease; / To see the inhuman God is our health” (“As the eye fails through age or disease,” CP, 3:479). In “Nova” (1937) he further explained that contemplation of nature and acceptance of our belonging to it bring awareness that the physical world transcends the individual human one. Just as the nova explodes and swallows the planets around it, so will our sun: “And we know that the enormous invulnerable beauty of things / Is the face of God, to live gladly in its presence, and die with­ out grief or fear knowing it survives us” (CP, 2:531). Jeffers insisted on the integrity of the world apart from what imagination makes of it in the poem “Credo” (1927): . . . I think that the ocean in the bone vault is only The bone vault’s ocean . . . 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. (CP, 1:239) Death means only dissolution into the elements, the source of all life. The beauty of the world will survive all human appreciation of it even though the chief goal of humankind should be to reverence the beauty of nature. Yet even as he vilified that consciousness that separates human beings from nature, Jeffers refined and developed his philosophy, showing through the poetry just how the mind belongs in the world and is not alien from it. Most notably in “De Rerum Virtute” (1954), the title of which alludes to Lucretius’s poem, Jeffers turned from his view of people as desecrators and aberrations of nature to positing his theory that they are an essential part of the Great Memory itself.3 In the first stanza, the speaker, observing a skull, considers that all thoughts and emotions are gone from it like clouds; what remains is a “blown-out eggshell”

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(CP, 3:401–3). As Hamlet, standing in a graveyard and holding a skull, meditates on the end of all human beings and their decomposition into the earth, the speaker in Jeffers’s poem considers what this “bone bubble” once held: thoughts and emotions moved under the “thin bone vault” like clouds moving under the vault of sky. Not only did love, desire, anger, and fear fill the mind, but also “the curious desire of knowing / Values and purpose and the causes of things” floated among the emotions like “a little observer air-plane.” Stanza 2 then leads Jeffers’s persona to ruminate that an egg too has a mind, one that is not conscious of itself and yet can do what chemists themselves cannot—build “the body of a hatchling, choosing among the proteins” for the wing muscles, nerves, eyes, and brain, forming “a limited but superhuman intelligence, / Prophetic of the future and aware of the past.” The intelligence is “limited” because its purpose is to animate the world, not busy itself with emotions and abstract thoughts like human intellect; it is “superhuman” because it transcends even the greatest ideas articulated or developed by human beings. All their ideas have their birth in this great mind. The creature—hawk or serpent—is created, like and unlike its ancestors, and slowly forms a new race. This is all part of the plan: . . . I believe the first living cell Had echoes of the future in it, and felt Direction and the great animals, the deep green forest And whale’s-track sea; I believe this globed earth Not all by chance and fortune brings forth her broods, But feels and chooses. (CP, 3:401–2) Here Jeffers articulated his conviction that all nature is one living being; that the earth “feels and chooses” implies that it possesses will and consciousness of a sort different from the human. Nature possesses intelligence, as Gary Snyder wrote in “The Wilderness” (Turtle Island, 106–10), but a better term is ecologist Eugene Odum’s “life-biomass,” information stored in genes and cells (107). The galaxy and whirlwind of stars, Jeffers wrote, is “not blind force, but fulfills its life and intends its courses” (CP, 3:402). As Robert Zaller described, in Jeffers the Christian drama of redemptive release from time was replaced by the vision of an ever-renewed universe in which all things were created, resumed, and spewed forth again from a nameless matrix that conferred on them an ungraspable transcendent order; this order was God, immanent in all things yet definable in none (Cliffs of Solitude, 217): “All things are full of God. / Winter and summer, day and night, war and peace are God” (CP, 3:402). The third stanza of “De Rerum Virtute” foretells the extinction of human beings and concludes that their lives have no meaning; the sun will burn itself out and wander the galaxy like a blind beggar; yet in stanza 4 the speaker declares that mankind too is beautiful. Here the speaker, standing on the cliff

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at Sovranes (like Whitman facing the end of the continent) and describing the Korean War in Macbeth’s image of a “tale told by an idiot,” cannot make up his mind whether to praise or condemn the “sick microbe.” Although he can find no beauty in the acts of human beings, he first considers that they may come to something, finally declaring that the great sculptors and poets (Michelangelo, Homer, Shakespeare) merely “flattered the race.” The concluding stanza states again that it is the beauty of things and not men (Jeffers’s word) that is the “immense beauty of the world.” He directs the reader’s attention—unadulterated by the human frailties of imagination, desire, or dream—to the details the poem takes ten lines to enumerate and describe—the peaks, ocean, soaring pelagic birds, desert, rain forest, Arctic ice—four times posing the rhetorical question of the earth’s beauty, which the reader must affirm. The relationship of the human being to this immense beauty is explained in the last five lines: The beauty of things means virtue and value in them. It is in the beholder’s eye, not the world? Certainly. It is the human mind’s translation of the transhuman Intrinsic glory. It means that the world is sound, Whatever the sick microbe does. But he too is part of it. (CP, 3:403) Virtue and value come from human perception, the beholder, or human mind who gives to the immense beauty of the world its interpretation. Although the beauty of the world exists independent of human observation and appreciation, the “intrinsic glory” is “transhuman”: in order for the world to be aware of its own glory there must be creatures who can celebrate it. Thus human consciousness, once the demon that deprived the upright ape of joy, makes the world “sound” (whole), whatever desecration the “sick microbe” causes. As Chapman commented on stanza 3, “Jeffers seems to suggest that if consciousness was part of the plan from the beginning there must be a role for consciousness throughout the entire unfolding of the cosmological drama until the end” (“‘De Rerum Virtute’: A Critical Anatomy,” 28). The last sentence confesses that God and the Great Memory of all things include humankind, self-deluded as people are. This poem articulates Jeffers’s arrival at his conviction that human beings are inseparable from the great beauty of the world. A poem unfinished at Jeffers’s death further explores his belief in a Great Memory of the world and its scientific and mythological ramifications. The original title, “The Beauty of Things,” is struck through and the poem was retitled “Anima Mundi,” Jung’s term for the Great Memory. Even earlier Jeffers had titled it “the unformed volcanic earth” (CP, 5:874–885). Instead of beginning with the private contemplation of something small and emblematic like a skull (as in “De Rerum Virtute”), the poem begins with creation of humankind and what the poet knew of human evolution from the historical-geological perspective, that

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climate change (one theory advanced at the time he wrote this manuscript) resulted in deforestation, drought, and forest fire, driving the apes out of their habitat, described in the poem as a home, “the green roof of Asia,” mother of the continents because it is the largest that came from Pangea. The apes thus lost their “Eden-garden”—perhaps the state of nature so reviled by Locke or freedom from self-awareness so praised by Jeffers in “Consciousness.” The apes lost their innocence and were forced to live on the “bloody” earth and struggle against predators, the wolf and tiger. Jeffers followed this with the explanation given by the theory of natural selection but took it farther: the most alert survived, adopting not merely an erect posture but “our erect attitude,” that of a rearing animal (perhaps gorilla or bear), revealing the violent nature of climate change and loss of innocence. Comparing posture to attitude, the poem continues to examine the ramifications of evolution: “Man’s ancestors were apes going erect / In terror and rage and wonder.”4 After the metaphoric language of the first nine lines, the speaker adopts that of direct statement and abstraction and in so doing captures the human condition: people’s lot was terror and rage, but also wonder and hence appreciation of and curiosity about the world they inhabited and now thought they ruled. In these few lines he also combines the Aristotelian definition of tragedy with the Judaic myth of the loss of innocence. Jeffers continues his rhetorical tone in discussion about the evolution not of the body but the mind: “The old estrangement” (from nature) still haunted people to the extent that they invented magic, religion, and philosophy. The speaker then extrapolates from the discourse on history to give his philosophy, which differs from other philosophies in that it heals the estrangement. He declares that “we” (as he is now part of the group of terrified, raging, wondering people) need only to become aware that “all things are one thing, from the farthest star / To the slime in a ditch or blood in our hearts, one energy, / One organism.” Earlier poems stated that the whole world is one beautiful organism, but here the speaker goes on to declare that “nearly all things are beautiful” (including the erect apes) and that “the whole glory / Certainly is.” The speaker ceases to be a third-person observer and declares “I think it is alive,” fortifying his theory with human experience, feeling the life of trees, rocks, stars. In this poem as well as “De Rerum Virtute” the use of Anglo-Saxon alliteration and Homeric epithets lends epical force to verse that is concerned with profound issues of historical consequence. In the earlier poem one hears “somber stupendous glory,” “foam flying at their flanks,” “plunging promontories,” “flameshaped peaks,” “cloud-stream,” “sage-brush desert,” “sun-stricken,” “high thrones of ice.” With “the whale’s-track sea” Jeffers alluded to Beowulf ’s “whale road,” an image that captures the dependence of human life on the natural world. “Anima Mundi” contains images of “thunder-set fires,” “glacial storms,” “fire-nourished / Fierce lives of stars,” and “Eden-garden” in order to reveal through metaphor the

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earth’s beauty just as human consciousness stands as intermediary, interpreting for the world and God their own beauty and magnificence. In these two poems Jeffers solved the problem of the Inhumanist or deep ecologist who wishes to be part of nature and at the same time realizes his or her separation from it: merely by loving it and beholding its beauty human beings know its glory and transcend their separation from it. “Anima Mundi” then develops Jeffers’s philosophical treatise with a selfreflexive question: “the world is not a machine but living: it is not credible / That life and awareness—what shall I say?—soul— /Are confined [to] the little clan of oxygen-breathing / Copulators, man, beast and plants, in the immense world.” A second question, this time rhetorical, formulates his conception of Anima Mundi, asking how human beings can be conscious if the universe (earth and sun) that made them is not (“How is man conscious, if the earth and the sun / That he is made of have not some kind of consciousness?”). The speaker concludes this discussion with a syllogism: “And if parts, then the whole.” The persona continues with the comparison of galaxies to the cells of the body, the metaphor revealing the organic nature of what many believe to be nonliving—the universe—and the interconnectedness of the body with its environment: “This whole—the innumerable galaxies / Are the cells of its body; beyond them we know not anything—this everlasting life, this God / Is like the life of a man . . .” (876). The whole is an “everlasting life,” a God, the galaxies being the cells of its body, and God and human beings are alike in that they are neither good nor evil. The recognition that beyond the galaxies “we know not anything” asserts that neither can we plumb the depths of the nature of God. The description in parentheses contains the standard Jeffersian comment on the human condition: that we are “happy awhile and awhile miserable.” Then the speaker compares the human life again to the “life of lives,” God, who is young and old, joyful and sad, victorious and vanquished—the list of oxymorons goes on— without “goal nor hope.” Again adopting the stance of an observer commenting on what he sees, he names the God Heautontimoroumenos, the self-tormenter, like the dying god Dionysus or Christ. The beauty of this god is excellence or virtue: nothing else has value, although Jeffers here did not celebrate this beauty by enunciating its details as he did earlier. Jeffers broke a line in order to emphasize the speaker’s adopting the pose of a prophet contemplating tragedy: human lives are so futile that it might be better if everyone committed suicide except for humankind’s appreciation of the beauty of the world that shines over all “Like a fire on a mountain” (CP, 5:877). He again asserts, “The beauty of things is the only value; / Whatever is beautiful is worthy of love.” Thus humankind’s ability to appreciate the glory and beauty of nature is all that matters, but what separates this fragment from his earlier statements of the same principle is the working

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out of his philosophy of the organic wholeness of all things, that wholeness being God. With this manuscript Jeffers examined not only the origins and evolution of human life but of human thought, postulating that the beauty of the world drove great artists such as Aeschylus and Michelangelo to create their masterpieces. Jeffers compared the Fallopian tube to a “blind cave” (perhaps the intellectual blindness of early human beings or their dark dwellings) and again stated that human consciousness “opens a little window in the wall / Through which God’s emotions . . . / Glare at the stars” (CP, 5:878). Jeffers declared that a poet such as Wordsworth would not have found peace in wild nature but only in the tamed landscape of England and proposed the idea that the ice age itself created human beings by awakening their minds to fire, and from “the old grounded ape” came Michelangelo and Shakespeare, praisers of violence, and Buddha and Christ, praisers of love (CP, 5:879). Other drafts contain further assertions that all things are part of a unified, living creation that knows itself through those species that experience self-consciousness: “I think the dumb rocks / And wine and water, and this planet the earth, / Have a diffused consciousness; all things are dimly conscious, / But the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brain, / Bring it to focus” (CP, 5:879). Here the speaker incorporates the idea that human consciousness is part of the Anima Mundi. If human beings can be said to have a purpose in the world, it is that they reflect, through their emotions, the glory of the universe. The nerves and brain “like a burning-glass” ignite the heat (consciousness) and enable the universe to know itself: “So we scream, laugh and moan. / The rocks and stars do not scream, / but . . . I think they feel” (CP, 5:879). In other fragments he asks whether early life somehow foresaw its end, whether early cellular life could “forehope” to create the mind of Aeschylus, the lion, or eagle (881). Toward the end of the fragments he returns to his declaration of the unity of God with the cosmos: “I believe the universe / Is all one God” (CP, 5:882) and continues with Whitmanesque scope: “There is a power beyond powers, there is a consciousness / That includes all their criers, and the secretkeeping / Rocks and sky; there is no atom nor energy in all the universe but feels the weight / Of all upon it: the farthest star’s rays / Influence the life of the sun, which makes and changes the lowest worm in the sod” (CP, 5:882). Thus late in his career Jeffers confirmed the idea of the oneness of everything that is God and asserted his conviction that human beings for all their folly are not only part of the beauty but an important part precisely because of the self-awareness that he regretted so bitterly in “Consciousness.” Yeats’s Spiritus Mundi contained images that enabled artists to speak to people out of their own cultural memory, while Jeffers’s Great Memory existed as part of the physical processes of the world, the atoms and chemical changes

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of the biological and nonbiological universe, and was present in everything. The similarity in their language—Yeats declaring the Great Memory to be “a single, intense, unhesitating energy” and Jeffers describing it as “different expressions of the same energy . . . in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole”—shows that Yeats may have influenced Jeffers’s philosophy of culture and history, but while Yeats’s Spiritus Mundi is the memory of Nature, Jeffers takes the theory one step further and claims that it is Nature as made manifest through human understanding. The power of poetry lies in its ability to articulate the connection between the unconscious universal memory and the conscious mind (at its best moments) appreciating the beauty and power of the earth and the cosmos.

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6. Radical Traditionalism In “Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years,” Jeffers articulated his philoso­ phy that in order to be good literature, poetry must be understandable to people even after a thousand years. Lasting values, not temporary political dogma, should inform the work. He shared Yeats’s dissatisfaction with contemporary values and sought answers to the dilemma of the modern by looking to older times. Both poets worked out poetic philosophies in which their vision for the future was based on the traditional. Both desired to return to an idealized tradition—in Jeffers’s case, independent self-sufficiency in harmony with nature. Drawing inspiration from John O’Leary, Yeats drew symbols from precolonial Irish folklore and legend for the development of a culturally unified Ireland. James Applewhite claimed that William Morris was Yeats’s ideal man. In Morris, Yeats found no separation of intellect from nature, seeing Morris as a poet, painter, artisan, and promoter of handicrafts in opposition to machine manufacture (Seas and Inland Journeys, 167–69). Gilbert Allen claimed that both Yeats and Jeffers were fundamentally concerned with history: “For Yeats, however, the past is cultural; for Jeffers, the past is geological” (61). Jeffers and Yeats embraced what may be called “radical traditionalism.” (See my “A man who does not exist,” 41–43). They looked to earlier times in order to find the values they thought might rejuvenate and inform the present, which Jeffers believed was corrupt and lacking in principle and moral strength, and Yeats believed was hostile to art and inimical to culture and heroism. They were traditionalist because both thought that these values had existed in earlier times; their radicalism stemmed from belief that contemporary society needed upheaval and revolution of a spiritual nature. Although they both praise older, more heroic times and societies, Yeats and Jeffers differed widely in their concerns. Borrowing and modifying the ideas of John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, Yeats looked

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to civilizations and cultures he admired for values that would reinvigorate the present—famous civilizations that could serve, he believed, as prototypes for an ideal. While Jeffers envisioned the best world as one devoid of human habitation, he defined the best way of human life as the solitary, self-sufficient one. Jeffers’s own philosophy is contained in a late poem called “The Last Conservative,” which articulates the value of nature, solitude, independence, beauty, and loyalty. Jeffers’s persona has built his house in a place steeped in tradition— on a rocky outcrop where native dwellers once set up their camps. He witnesses evidence of their existence in the shell mound and red fire stains on the rocks. The place is “Maiden,” with no previous buildings or neighbors, only coyotes howling and deer in the dooryard. When he declares, “We raised two boys here; all that we saw or heard was beautiful / And hardly human” (CP, 3:418), he creates a tradition of his way of life, as did Yeats in “The Municipal Gallery Re-visited” (1937), where the poet declares of his friends Augusta Gregory and John Synge that “All that we did, all that we said or sang / Must come from contact with the soil, from that / Contact everything Anteus-like grew strong” (CW, 1:321). Jeffers, like Yeats, established his tradition in the place he identified as emblematic of his own aesthetic. In the second stanza of “The Last Conservative” Jeffers’s persona despairs of the “heavy change,” the world having deteriorated like a “rotting apple”: too many houses, streets, and cars, and worst of all the loss of his wife. The final stanza, however, reveals some optimism. The natural world—the source of all virtue—may have been invaded, but it exists and even permeates the human one imposed upon it. The natural is the real world, which will be present when human artifacts are gone: The ocean at least is not changed at all, Cold, grim and faithful; and I still keep a hard edge of forest Haunted by long gray squirrels and hoarse herons: And hark the quail, running on the low roof ’s worn shingles Their little feet patter like rain-drops. (CP, 3:418) His philosophy anticipates what was later called “deep ecology” and presages Gary Snyder’s description of the way nature will reveal the sacred places: “I think we should be patient, and give the land a lot of time to tell us or the people of the future. The cry of a Flicker, the funny urgent chatter of a Gray Squirrel, the acorn whack on a barn roof—are signs enough” (The Practice of the Wild, 96). The deterioration of the world is in its building and populating: Jeffers’s traditionalism desires natural surroundings and knowledge of the sacredness of the earth. Jeffers used the word “conservative” as we might use “traditionalist”: suspicious of both saviors and Caesars (religious and political dogma), Jeffers believed primarily in the strength of nature itself. His tradition stemmed from geological process—as understood from the rocks, ancestry of plants and animals, and

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older, more self-sufficient ways of life for human beings. Max Oelschlaeger, in The Idea of Wilderness, defined Jeffers as a post-Romantic who found in ancient myth a “premodern wisdom” (245). The same can be said for Yeats’s search for wisdom, beauty, and the true source of Irish culture in ancient Celtic myth and legend, but here we find the fundamental difference between Yeats’s and Jeffers’s aesthetics: while Yeats was essentially a romantic, employing classical and Irish myth and legend to launch his quest into the unknown, Jeffers was primarily a classicist, believing that all has been known before and that poetic knowledge is contained in restoring and reliving archetypal experience. Yeats presented the Irish landscape directly through his poetry, prose, and drama, but he did so in order to locate the true source of Irishness. Jeffers found in nature the only source for culture, art, and religion. Radcliffe Squires pointed out that Jeffers’s faith in direct statement and moralistic commentary suggests traditionalism (Loyalties, vii) and that he is probably the most religious of all twentieth-century American poets (5). Terence Diggory continued this theme by stating that in thinking of his work in terms of a tradition, Jeffers preserved the impersonal aesthetic that he feared he had abandoned: “Tradition, as a dimension of the self, is a larger-than-life dimension such as Jeffers had sought to incorporate in the characters of his narratives and plays” (132). Jeffers and Yeats both found only emptiness in the new materialism of their times. Even when Jeffers seems to be at his most extreme point of antihumanism, he is a traditionalist. According to Robert Zaller, The Love and the Hate (1948), although marred by rhetoric and questionable taste, is nevertheless one of the sparest and most classical of Jeffers’s narratives: “the action is swift, the development taut, the dialogue terse and direct,” and it remains the most powerful American antiwar poem (Cliffs of Solitude, 193). Jeffers upheld the values of protest and conscience, long held to be quintessential American principles, even though he argued in “Shine, Perishing Republic” that public policy or public opinion often crushes individualism. Jeffers’s description of himself in “The Last Conservative” as representing the close of an era is reminiscent of Yeats’s claim in “Coole and Ballylee, 1931”: “We were the last romantics—chose for theme / Traditional sanctity and loveliness” (CW, 1:245). Here he embraced the Romantic tradition; in other poems he looked toward eighteenth-century statesmen such as Edmund Burke and Henry Grattan and toward the high Italian Renaissance for prototypes of nobility. In “September, 1913,” shopkeepers intent on salvation and money (values that seem contradictory, until one realizes the material nature of “saving the soul”) have “dried the marrow from the bone” (made themselves timid) and killed the spirit of romantic Ireland (CW, 1:108–9). Seamus Deane argued that Yeats’s aesthetic emanates from “that long line of European Romantic writers who combined a revolutionary aesthetic with traditionalist politics” (Celtic Revivals, 38), that

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one of Yeats’s dominant themes was release from British empirical philosophy and urban industrial capitalism. In opposition to materialist philosophy, Yeats chose peasant and aristocrat as kindred spirits against industrialism, the one representing traditional ways of life that keep alive the ancient songs and stories, the other perpetuating the culture through its education and generosity. Yeats wanted to restore what he conceived of as older traditions—to make the peasants’ stories current among the educated classes in order to revivify Irish culture. The poet furthermore wanted the new Ireland to resemble his ideal of Ancient Hibernia. The people’s renewed sense of nationhood would be drawn from older conventions and expressed through a national art inspired by folklore and legend; Yeats wrote in 1904 that the Irish “must grope [their] way towards a new yet ancient perfection” (Letters, ed. Wade, 440). He was thus both radical—in wanting to transform Ireland—and traditional—in using old Irish customs and beliefs in order to do so. New perfection is thus the essence of Yeats’s radicalism; ancient perfection is the essence of his traditionalism. Jeffers also clearly perceived the interdependence of moral and economic ideologies, as for example in “Ave Caesar” (1935) when he portrayed what Dana Gioia has called the crippling contradiction at America’s heart—the desire for both freedom and wealth (“Strong Council,” 215). “Ave Caesar” (1935) notes the discrepancy between what Americans say they are and what they really are; our ancestors also wanted both freedom and wealth, and consequently our children will learn to hope for a Caesar (a dictator) or rather “Some kindly Sicilian tyrant who’ll keep  / Poverty and Carthage off until the Romans arrive,” so that they need not defend themselves (CP, 2:486). Although Americans pride themselves on their independence, they are “easy to manage, a gregarious people / Full of sentiment, clever at mechanics, and we love our luxuries.” For Jeffers materialism remained the fundamental flaw in the American character as it remained for Yeats the flaw in the character of modern Ireland. In “Shine, Republic” (1935) Jeffers revealed that what he believed was good in the Western democracies is their love of freedom. The “stubborn torch” of independence, dangerous and beautiful, burns from Marathon to Concord, binding three ages of barbarism and civilization (CP, 2:417). In this one noble passion Greeks, Romans, Europeans, and Americans are one. He apostrophized an America that was not engendered for prosperity but for independence. Yet he cautioned that Americans cannot have luxury as well as freedom for they are inimical to each other. Jeffers declared freedom to be “poor and laborious” as well as “hungry,” requiring “blood for its fuel.” The tone is regretful yet realistic; seldom in recorded history have people won independence without sacrifice. Americans, Jeffers thought, no longer wish to defend freedom but to band together under the protection of some tyrant. While Jeffers’s isolationism during the 1940s may seem to contradict this stern pronouncement, his reference here

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is to defense of the country from outside aggression, not involvement in foreign conflicts. He stated that spiritual degradation results from overdependence on luxuries and warned that love of prosperity has brought dependence: “we cannot have all the luxuries and freedom also.” The people have grown fearful of freedom, will “tame it against it burn too clearly” and will “hood it like a kept hawk.” What he objected to so severely is the materialism of Americans who never question what individual freedom means and who desire protection for their property while shirking responsibility. Jeffers wanted the American republic to protect solitude and to stay out of other nations’ quarrels; nevertheless he enjoined the country to keep its traditions, forms, and observances, so that future nations will learn from it: “The states of the next age will no doubt remember you, and edge their love of freedom with contempt of luxury.” Still it was not concern for the future that inspired Jeffers but concern for the present: Americans should quell their love of luxury and create of their nation what they always thought it might have been. Jeffers seems to ignore the plight of people caught in the Depression of the 1930s, who were less concerned with luxuries than with survival, but the poem transcends its own time to comment on the exploitation and greed that has characterized the American way of life from its inception to the present. The poem may be addressing not the victims but the perpetrators of the Depression. For all his praise of the Western democracies’ love of freedom in “Shine, Perishing Republic,” nevertheless their own freedom has always been more valuable to them than that of other nations. Jeffers had thought of the people (Ameri­cans), he says in “Shine, Empire” (1941), as “something higher than the natural run of the earth,” no doubt because of their love of freedom; but “he was wrong: “we are lower. We are the people who hope to win wars with money as we win elections” (CP, 3:17). He believed that the future is already determined: “We must put freedom away and stiffen into bitter empire.” Now, our ideals thoroughly compromised, we aim at world rule like the ancient kingdoms that have disappeared (Assyria, Rome) and the newer ones that have been attenuated (Britain, Germany). Jeffers’s “Hellenistics” (1937) takes the ironic tone of one who is glad that Americans have given up notions of freedom: we are well quit of them because we have traded it for prosperity. Section 1 begins with images of Western civilization, a Greek-derived design on a vase and a four-drachma piece with the head of Alexander. Now the speaker looks at the coast, where he sees the God who preceded all of civilization and culture—Nature. In section 2 he changes focus and declares all human beings to be contemptible, including Africans and Asians as well as Europeans; his own Puritan “frost-bitten forefathers” are more shameful than beasts (CP, 2:526). At least the Greeks, he declares, “pared down the shame of three vices / Natural to man and no other animal”: cruelty, filth,

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and superstition (religion). Ancient cultures were endowed with some virtue; modern cultures are not. Section 3 foretells the end of the age: after the fighting will come “flowering and ordered prosperity.” The age will then be vitiated; people in the cities of the empire will say “Freedom? Freedom was a fire. We are well quit of freedom, we have found prosperity.” They will deny evil in the spoiled, “sterile” time, but after the death of freedom the age will change again—“slowly the machines break down, slowly the wilderness returns.” This section, however, also declares that a new dark age will come and wars go on: “all the little Caesars fidget on their thrones.” Section 4 celebrates this new age of barbarism and equates it with strength and moral purity. The real evils are not “hardship, hunger and violence,” which the new age will come to know: they are cruelty, filth, and superstition. He tells the “distant future children” to mourn their “own dead” but not “civilization . . . our scuttled futilities.” These children of a new dark age are saved from what present society is: “little empty bundles of enjoyment.” Their lives will become “lovely and terrible again, great and in earnest.” The new people will stand among spears, proud and unafraid. It is this desire for earnestness and meaning in the lives of the people, not the breakdown of culture and civilization, that Jeffers shares with Yeats. Some critics have seen in Jeffers both reformist and traditional Jeffersonian Democrat. Jeffers’s republic is self-contained and minds its own business, like the solitary rider on the mountain whose way of life Jeffers praised. He saw and proclaimed the spiritual failure of modern values: “In this tyranny of scientific materialism and of political enslavement, work has become drudgery” (Gilbert, Shine, Perishing Republic, 35, 92). Jeffers detested dictatorship, “right, left, or center,” which would limit personal freedom, and his preference for small ranches belongs to the tradition of Thomas Jefferson’s nation of yeoman farmers who provided for themselves and their families without servants or slaves. Thus in the midst of his seeming anti-Americanism, Jeffers was perhaps the most American. At times Yeats wished for the same sort of simplicity that Jeffers praised. William Everson deemed the line of Jeffers’s “A barren foreland” (CP, 5. 297) to be Yeatsian: “There are only simple things here” (“Robinson Jeffers’s Ordeal of Emergence,” 181). Yeats proclaimed, for example, in “A Prayer on Going into My House,” that he wanted No table or chair or stool not simple enough For shepherd lads in Galilee; and grant That I myself for portions of the year May handle nothing and set eyes on nothing But what the great and passionate have used

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Throughout so many varying centuries We take it for the norm. . . . (CW, 1:162) Thus Yeats also wanted to adopt a way of life that would embody a tradition devoid of superfluity and to return to simplicity and earnestness. Yeats, however, desired the sparseness of Irish legend and folklore, not Jeffers’s freedom-loving democracy, and, while Yeats’s own tower and cottage preserve this simplicity and cultural memory, other houses must preserve the material culture that is emblematic of greatness. In the series “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” the poem “Ancestral Houses” (1923) addresses the issue of the importance of tradition. In this poem as in “To a Wealthy Man . . . ,” Yeats declared that the great and wealthy have the responsibility of providing to the people what is necessary for their culture. Earlier, in “Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation” (1910), Yeats acknowledged that land reform might help the small farms (“Mean roof-trees were the sturdier for its fall”), but only the educated and cultivated people represented by the great house could provide for the common people the cultural resources to create a new nation: “written speech” formed from “high laughter, loveliness and ease” (CW, 1:95–96). Elizabeth Cullingford explained that this poem is less autocratic than elegiac. Lady Gregory’s house, the one “shaken” by agrarian unrest, served as the place where the 1903 Wyndham Land Act—which allowed tenants to buy farms from landowners—was planned, and her nephew John Shawe-Taylor had been the land-purchase scheme’s first architect (Yeats, Ireland and Fascism, 69). Shawe-Taylor, Lady Gregory, and Hugh Lane, another nephew—famous for his attempt to donate a valuable art collection to Ireland—were all “in their different ways aristocratic nationalists” (68). In the same spirit, the material culture in “Ancestral Houses” becomes emblematic of this cultivated greatness as well as the culture itself. Yeats had more faith in great leaders such as Charles Stewart Parnell, John O’Leary, Henry Grattan, and Edmund Burke than he had in contemporary ones; at the end of the poem, he questioned the viability of the traditions he had praised. For Jeffers, on the other hand, culture and civilization are both culprits that leave the lives of people devoid of meaning. “New Mexican Mountain” (1931) is a picture of spiritual starvation. The Native American people have lost much of their culture—so much so that the young men are reluctant to dance and must be persuaded by the older men. Although the ceremony is but a “poor show,” white Americans come willingly to see it because they are “People from cities, anxious to be human again,” spiritually hungry “Pilgrims from civilization, anxiously seeking beauty, religion, poetry; pilgrims from the vacuum” of their sterile lives (CP, 2:158). The drum, however, remains truly vibrant, sending the message that “civilization is a transient sickness.” Jeffers would have had people

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return to a purer form of tribal life more in contact with nature than alienated and alienating modern civilization. One of Jeffers’s many solitary characters, the hermit in “Thebaid” (1937), imagined slightly earlier than the stoic Chinese philosophers in Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” (1938), gazes with “great stunned eyes” not at a religious miracle but at the elements—the sun rising and setting, desert sand, night stars, the “incredible magnificence of things” (CP, 2:532–33). All others are jejune prophets and believers, delirious with their faith. Weak people turn to Mother Church (religion) and Father State (law) or to some savior such as Christ, Karl Marx, or Adolf Hitler, who offers only magic or dreams of power. Civilization, Jeffers’s hermit asserts in the second stanza, breeds weak people who must turn to religion, first becoming obsessed with it and then murdering for it. Those who desire to live “harmlessly” must find a cave in a mountain or desert, avoid human beings, exist with “kindly wolves” and “luckier ravens,” and wait “for the end of the age.” The last living man will surely be able to behold the earth as it is—“the real earth and skies, / Actual life and real death.” While Jeffers believed that civilization engendered evil, however, much that was good nevertheless came from it. “Still the Mind Smiles” (1931) points out the irony that, while civilization makes humanity ridiculous, its whole fabric is beautiful; the excesses balance each other like “the paired wings of a flying bird” (CP, 2:310). In order to find good in this horrible freedom-denying society (“this fretful time”), it is necessary to remember the “same-colored wings of imagination” that humanity will try to clip and impede, but which grow nevertheless in “lonely places.” These are “the unchanged  / Lives of herdsmen and mountain farms, / Where men are few, and few tools, a few weapons, and their dawns are beautiful.” The city dwellers in “Sirens” (1941), however, prefer sterile amusements—alcohol, opiates, and sex—rather than the “angels of life” as they move between newscast and work desk (CP, 3:4). This reliance on frivolous things is another sign that the age needs renewal. The people are like Yeats’s common ones in “The Fisherman” (1916)—the witty man who tells jokes to please the crowd and the clever man who clowns, beating down both great art and those who are wise. Rejection of great art was the “reality” he faced (CW, 1:148–49). Scorning the modern audience’s penchant for trivial amusement, Yeats imagined his ideal audience, the man in “grey Connemara cloth,” solitary, wise, and quiet as well as of ambiguous identity: he may be an Irish peasant or an AngloIrish gentleman, but he is certainly a noble countryman whose life becomes a work of art, so integrated is he with his surroundings. The masses in both poems ignore the values on which their cultures were founded, and so their lives lack earnestness and fulfillment. For Jeffers cities everywhere have become mere traps. “What Are Cities For?” (1933) assures the reader that goldenrod will one day break up the concrete

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of New York just as asphodel covers Sicilian Syracuse (CP, 2:418) while “The Purse-Seine” (1935), one of Jeffers’s most frequently anthologized poems, gives a much bleaker picture of urban existence. Beginning with the description of the sardine fishermen off the Monterey coast, who must work by night in the dark of the moon because the brightness of sunlight or moonlight would obscure the phosphorescence of the fish shoals, the poet describes the fishermen circling the shoal while allowing the net to drift, then closing and drawing it in. The scene is beautiful and terrible when the crowded fish, realizing they are caught, beat the water “to a pool of flame” while outside the net sea lions watch and “the vast walls of night / Stand erect to the stars” (CP, 2:517). The view of a great city inspired in Jeffers the same beauty and terror: We have geared the machines and locked all together into interdependence; we have built the great cities; now There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival, insulated From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent. (CP, 2:518) City dwellers hardly feel that they are being caught; yet already they shine— perhaps a reference to city lights, or more probably Jeffers’s way of indicating the summit of a nation or culture before it declines. According to Robert Zaller, in “The Purse-Seine” the glow is the shimmer of decay (Cliffs of Solitude, 209), and Jeffers used this image to describe ancient or contemporary cultures built on narcissism. In The Tower beyond Tragedy (1924), for example, Orestes tells Electra, “the net of desire / Had every nerve drawn to the center, so that they writhed like a full draught of fishes, all matted, / In the one mesh” (CP, 1:176). Jeffers understood the moral conflict in contemporary life, writing in “Themes in My Poems” (1941) that there exists a spiritual conflict that lies at the heart of our culture, and creates a strain there. The religions and ethics of other civilizations were more or less home-grown; they adapted themselves to the people, and the people to the religions; but Christianity is Oriental and Near-Eastern in origin, and was imposed on the western races rather recently, as history goes; and we have never got used to it. We still hold two sets of ethics, pagan and Christian, simultaneously. For instance, we say that we should love our enemies and not resist evil; yet at the same time we believe in justice, and that criminals ought to be punished, and that we should meet violence with violence. Or another instance: we believe in humility; but we also believe in masculine pride and self-assertion. . . . (CP, 4:410)

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According to Zaller, Jeffers saw the contradiction between mass religion and belief in individual transcendence; he knew that the individual was bound to the collective destiny of the race by shared circumstance, shared nature, shared infirmity (Cliffs of Solitude, 125). Each person has a social and collective destiny, and any poetics must entail a theory of history (203). Jeffers’s answer, explains Zaller, is that “Man must therefore transcend himself, not his temporality, which was simply the condition in which he found himself in the world” (222). In The Tower beyond Tragedy he renounced resurrection (Zaller, Cliffs of Solitude, 222); he emphasized this position in “Sign-Post” (1933; quoted in chapter 5), where his persona states his formula for the reachievement of humanness, which has been lost to civilized people (Zaller, Cliffs of Solitude, 222). They must abandon narcissism and love the natural world: “Turn outward, love things, not men, turn right away from humanity” (CP, 2:418). In order to do so, Jeffers wrote, “Lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinity / Make your veins cold, look at the silent stars, let your eyes / Climb the great ladder out of the pit of yourself and man.” Jeffers declared that the earth itself is divine and that communion with earth is what will reveal to the individual the way to the divinity: Things are the God, you will love God, and not in vain, For what we love, we grow to it, we share its nature. (CP, 2:418) The individual is thus reborn as part of nature, not civilization. In fact, as Radcliffe Squires pointed out, many of Jeffers’s poems portray the potential nobility of life (The Loyalties of Robinson Jeffers, 129), including “Boats in a Fog” and “Now Returned Home,” in which human beings mimic other creatures by going about their own business simply. These poems celebrate much more somberly a natural life that is perilous and lonely but also characterized by “tenacity and purpose” (130). The fact that Jeffers believed in the existence of universal meanings, Zaller claimed, makes him as a religious poet (Cliffs of Solitude, 124). Narcissism is the enemy of humankind and one of its chief failings. In “Science” (1924), Jeffers wrote that human beings are so taken up with self-love that they have created a monster. The inventions of the new age, lacking tradition, have rendered humankind incapable of managing its hybrids such as the biplane in “The Machine” (1928), where the speaker sees the natural size of the moon and the night herons, but the plane is “Insect in size as in form” (CP, 1:394). The moon has been there “unnumbered / Ages of years” and the herons have croaked much longer than people have spoken language, but the plane has no past. New inventions, created through cunning and materialism, not through necessity, can never bring meaning to human life. Moreover the myriad inventions do not even improve life. Jeffers’s poem “Edison” (1931) declares that the “careful gifts of good men / Narrow the lives and erode the souls of people” (CP, 2:173).

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Edison, a “light-bringer” like Prometheus, could not have envisioned that his gift would be used to invent weapons and bombs. Arthur B. Coffin pointed out that “The Answer” (1935) admonishes people not to live apart from nature but to realize that we are part of it and dependent on it, to make certain that whatever benevolent capacity science once had for man is not perverted into new modes of destruction and debilitating mechanical convenience (Robinson Jeffers, 213). In “Staggering Back toward Life” (1944), Jeffers’s speaker declares that radar and rockets, chemistry, and the tricks of physics are new cunning rather than new science. Human society needs “a new dark-age, five hundred years of winter and the tombs for dwellings” (CP, 3:135). The answer is a new age of reinvigoration, which Yeats would have approved of. Jeffers’s attitude is not Carlyle’s hero worship: “it is the simple longing for a bygone day when men of heroic vision were also permitted heroic deeds” (Coffin, Robinson Jeffers, 127). For Jeffers, the older tradition allows the individual the independence to live his life, do his work, and remain free from the artificial demands of civilization. Zaller remarked that for Jeffers urban life reinforced narcissism and anomie in a self-perpetuating cycle: “Divorced materially, intellectually, and spiritually from the natural world, modern man was enclosed in the artifice of his cities . . .” (Cliffs of Solitude, 207). “The Broken Balance” (1926) was the broken balance of nature: As modern man lost his organic connection to the earth he increasingly perceived it as an object of conquest; the overlap between these events he called “progress.” Progress was the ultimate project of the modern will, the reduction of the world to terrain, of universal process to naive recurrences that, once deciphered, passively awaited man’s disposal. But progress itself was curiously afflicted by loss of affect, increasing mastery by loss of con­trol, as purpose degenerated into mere persistence and finally “deep indifference,” a mechanized somnambulism in which the will, having lost even the mem­ory of its own command, drifted destructively in a phantasmal void. Lost amid conquest, modern men were dwindled and anxious; in the mass they seemed still more vulnerable, as they clung to each other for support. (206) Pleasure rationalized as progress led to profound despair (206). Jeffers’s ideal life looks to an older time before civilization began to corrupt the human race. He offered, as an antidote to this sterile time and spiritually bankrupt civilization, only the love of nature and solitude. In the first lines of the narrative Mara (1938) Ferguson tells himself he has the best life—he lives in the country, rides horses, and herds cattle (CP, 3:38). In an untitled late verse Jeffers stated that the best life belongs to those who ride horses and drive cattle: “What’s the best life for a man?” he asks in the first line and then answers

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To ride in the wind. To ride horses and herd cattle In solitary places above the ocean on the beautiful mountain, and come home hungry in the evening And eat and sleep. (CP, 3:424) The solitary man will live an active life in the rain and wind. “I will have shepherds for my philosophers,” the poet’s persona says, just as Yeats, wishing for a union of aristocrat and peasant in order to revivify the culture, created an audience of people like the solitary fisherman who does not exist. Jeffers’s persona wants “lunatics / For my poets” who tell fantastic stories that increase the dignity and importance of human beings: “necessary lies  / Best told by fools.” There will be no lawyers or constables, no wars or mass slaughter, no doctors but “old women gathering herbs on the mountain.” “The Coast-Road” (1935) similarly declares that I too Believe that the life of men who ride horses, herders of cattle on the mountain pasture, plowers of remote Rock narrowed farms in poverty and freedom, is a good life. (CP, 2:522) The road and what has brought it will destroy this good life of the solitary rancher: “a rich and vulgar and bewildered civilization dying at the core.” He worries that the old rider will live long enough to witness what the road will do to his children. In Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature John Elder compared “The Coast-Road” with Wordsworth’s “Michael” (8), in which the poet desires renewed connection of man with nature, while Jeffers wanted separation, believing civilization had shattered any possibility of connection. In England people had been driven off the land by enclosures, while in California people came in, cleared timber, blasted roads, and irrigated the desert (9). Wordsworth’s hope was “fruitful inhabitation” (10), and poetry was for him a “landscape of memory, within which an individual may discover a circuit, not of estrangement but of reconciliation—between himself and the earth and, equally, between himself and his race” (10–11). The sheepfold in “Michael” represents the bond between father and son even if the son does not return; the unfinished sheepfold becomes an emblem of the sundered relationship of father and son as well as of people to the land (22). Jeffers disavowed civilization and was suspicious of humanity, but he is akin to Wordsworth in that he imagined a new community (his readers) in which earth and humanity participate (11). In “The Wind-Struck Music” (1935), a lyrical capsule narrative preceding “The Coast-Road” in Such Counsels You Gave to Me, the children of such a man are already corrupted. Jeffers personalized this rancher as Tom Birnam, who

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rides with his friend Ed Stiles on the bare hills alone above Mal Paso. Galloping after a heifer, the old man takes a spill; Tom remarks to Ed that his four strong sons are still abed in silk pajamas and wonders why he still works. Ed replies that it must be the sunrises—which Tom has earlier said he has no time to watch. The narrative finishes with Tom’s death at eighty-one, all those years lived under open skies and concerned only with cattle, horses, and hunting; that is, with “no thought or emotion that all his ancestors since the ice-age / Could not have comprehended” (CP, 2:520), much as Yeats wished Thoor Ballylee to contain nothing that shepherd lads in Galilee would not have understood. Jeffers declared Birnam’s to be a good life—narrow perhaps, but vastly better than most, and more beautiful: “the wind-struck music man’s bones were moulded to be the harp for.” Tom Birnam becomes part of nature, which Jeffers advises readers to do in “The Answer” (1937). People should not be deluded by dreams, should accept that all civilizations are transient, should avoid senseless violence, should keep their integrity, and should, above all, love “the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man / Apart from that” (CP, 2:536). Believing their nations were turning from the traditions that endowed them with meaning, Yeats and Jeffers created poetic philosophies from older values—earnestness of purpose, clarity of vision, and timeless ways of life in harmony with nature. Jeffers found his answer in geological time and the divine nature of the universe itself while Yeats found his in culture, tradition, and art deeply rooted in place. Both rejected the materialism of their times, which they believed perpetuated sterile, uninspiring values. If they seemed to desire the end of the present age, their reason was that they had faith not in destruction but in the eternity of recurring cycles; they hoped that adoption of older ways would reinvigorate civilization. Alienated not from modern humankind but from its materialism, Yeats and Jeffers sought from history and tradition ways to unify and revivify modern culture; that tradition stemmed ultimately from contact with the land, appreciation of the beauty of nature, and understanding the connection between culture and the land upon which it is built.

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Notes Chapter 1. Robinson Jeffers, W. B. Yeats, and Ecoprophecy 1. Introduction to Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, in The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, 4:385. The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers will be hereafter referred to as CP. 2. “The Statues,” The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, 1:337. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats will be hereafter referred to as CW. 3. I do not include “The Coast-Range Christ” in this assessment as that long poem is marred by forced rhyme and awkward diction. 4. Born of Enlightenment rationality, romantic subjectivity, urbanization, and industrialism, Modernism implied cultural fragmentation and loss of God. Jürgen Habermas found the origins of Modernism in the eighteenth-century attempt to develop “objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art” (“Modernity— An Incomplete Project,” 9). Peter Gay identified Modernism with the large urban centers of Europe and America (Modernism, 18–19) and named as its founder Friedrich Nietzsche with his ideas of the death of God and conspiracy of Judeo-Christian philosophy (29–30). James Karman, in the introduction to Jeffers’s collected letters, stated that literary Modernism is clearly identified with city life (“Life and Work,” 131). David Harvey asserted that secular Enlightenment thought broke with history and tradition, promised liberation from political and religious domination as well as the demands of subsistence, and proposed that unfettered creative individuals would be able to work toward physical and intellectual emancipation (The Condition of Postmodernity, 12–13). The great wars of the twentieth century, however, shattered both Enlightenment optimism and nineteenth-century faith in progress; thus having lost respect for its own past, modernity derived its meaning from change (11). Within this cultural disintegration, the artist had to define the essence of humanity and inform social and political vision with aesthetic vision (Harvey, 31). Marshall Berman explained that to be modern is “to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are . . . it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish” (All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 15). David

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Lloyd, moreover, commented that the seemingly endless violence of modernity constitutes part of its definition (Irish Times, 2008). If cultural Modernism implies the breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties, literary Modernism implies the dislocation of meaning and sense from normal contexts and embraces the ontological nature of philosophy, asking not what we know and how we know it epistemologically but how we identify the knowable things. In The Modern Tradition Richard Ellmann defined the qualities of Modernism as historical discontinuity and radical anticultural bias elevating social over individual existence, “unconscious feeling over self-conscious perception, and passion and will over intellection and systematic morals” (vi). In “Modernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism” David Lodge claimed that Modernist writing, anticipating Ferdinand de Saussure’s view of the arbitrary relationship between signifier (word) and signified (concept or object), and dominating literature during the 1920s, turns its back on the traditional idea of art as imitation of life (“art must tell the truth about life”) and substitutes autonomy: “we compose the reality we perceive by mental structures that are cultural, not natural in origin, and . . . it is art which is most likely to change and renew those structures” (4–5). Antimodernism, on the other hand, which dominated writing in the 1930s, “aspires to the condition of history” and “regards literature as the communication of a reality that exists prior to and independent of the act of communication” (6): “Antimodernist writing, then, gives priority to content, and is apt to be impatient with formal experiment, which obscures and hinders communication. The model of language it implies is the antithe­ sis of Saussure’s . . .” (7). 5. These two originally appeared as “Michael Robartes Bids His Beloved Be at Peace” and “Michael Robartes Remembers Forgotten Beauty.” Chapter 2. Landscape and the Self 1. In John Sherman, for example, Yeats wrote that in Sligo one sees the whole world in a day’s walk. 2. In “Four Years: 1887–1891,” book 1 of The Trembling of the Veil, Yeats wrote that he saw nothing good when he lived in London and, growing oppressed by the miles of brick and stone around him, fantasized that some modern John the Baptist could have made all the people leave the buildings and go out into the wilderness (CW, 3:140). 3. It is interesting that Jeffers used the phrase “mighty memories” in “The Year of Mourning” (1916) well before Yeats employed it in “The Tower” (1926). 4. Yeats may have been resurrecting a genre effectively “dead” or at least dormant since Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House” (1650). Hugh Jenkins has argued that the country-house poem, a genre devoted to maintaining the existing order, was replaced by the novel as the literary form devoted to the examination of social and ethical problems (16–17). Jonson’s poem was influenced by James I’s agrarian policy in response to the Midlands Revolt of 1607 to repopulate the country houses with aristocrats

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loyal to him (22). Centuries later, in “Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation” (CW, 1:95), Yeats lamented the breaking up of country estates (specifically Coole), which he equated with continuation of culture. The Irish government’s plan was to enable small farmers to increase the size of their holdings. William McClung’s more Yeatsian view argues that the country-house poem was not falsely utopian but rather “an evolving type of Arcadia,” a symbol of the national and cultural values founded on place (Jenkins, 27). 5. Robin and Una Jeffers recounted their visits to many sites mentioned in these poems in their letters from their trip (Collected Letters, 1:825–81). 6. Una Jeffers wrote to a friend that the family was prevented from renting a house on Achill Island by the poverty of the peasants who lived there in the midst of magnificent wild scenery. Chapter 3. “Two curves in the air”—Prophecy and Eternal Recurrence 1. Terrence Diggory noted the similarity of Jeffers’s Mara to Yeats’s most prophetic poem, “The Second Coming,” which also foresees a new age of violence and destruction (129). Mara is a long narrative including themes of love, hate, adultery, and the cycles of civilization borne out in the experience of one person, Bruce Ferguson, living on a ranch just before the outbreak of World War II. At one point he tells his wife about Spengler’s philosophy: “A German professor Who thinks this bloody and tortured slave called history Has regular habits. Waves, you know, wave-lengths, separate waves of civilization Up and down like the sea’s; and the same sort of . . . life, arts, politics and so forth At the same level on each wave, you can predict ’em. At present We’re on the down-rip.” (CP, 3:70) 2. Yeats differed from Nietzsche, however, in his belief in the possibility of escape from historical recurrence for exceptional individuals (an idea introduced in “The Phases of the Moon” and elaborated upon in the later poems, especially “Sailing to Byzantium”), which was not part of Nietzsche’s vision. 3. Richard J. Finneran identified this as possibly the statue of Athena Polias in the Erechtheum (CW, 1:653). 4. Michael Wood concluded that the “Now” beginning the stanza refers to November 4, 1920, in Kiltartan, Galway, when a group of British auxiliaries (Black and Tans) shooting randomly from a lorry killed a young woman, Eileen Quinn, who was holding her baby in her arms. Lady Gregory recorded the incident in her journal (20–21). 5. The declaration is similar to Jeffers’s “What Are Cities For?” (CP, 2:418), in which the human condition provides the earth with “beautiful agonies,” and Spengler’s conception of the world changing its phase.

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6. Herodias here is the biblical queen (who asked her husband for the head of John the Baptist) grafted onto the Germanic witch-goddess also associated with the Sidhe, spirits who traveled upon whirling winds (CW, 1:592, 599, 608–9, 653). 7. The poet compares the present time with blood-sucking vampires or impregnation by a fiend. Yeats’s note declares this figure to be a fourteenth-century “evil spirit much run after in Kilkenny” (CW, 1:599). According to Wood, this figure is not just “the demon who terrified the Irish countryside but some sort of playboy of the spirit world” (136) to whom the sensuous witch Lady Kyteler brought vestiges of animal sacrifice, peacock feathers and combs of cocks, themselves emblems of perverted sexual desire. The etymology of “cockscomb” or “coxcomb” is interesting here: not only does it refer to the red comb of the rooster but also to the cap of a court jester decorated to resemble the cock’s comb, as well as to a pretentious fop. 8. For a discussion of Yeats’s iconography in this poem derived from Spengler see Callan, “W. B. Yeats’s Learned Theban,” 603. Chapter 4. Solitary Hero versus Social Man­—Jeffers’s Dear Judas and Yeat’s Calvary 1. Aherne continues: “I am not among those for whom Christ died, and this is why I must be hidden. I have a leprosy that even eternity cannot cure. I have seen the whole, and how can I come again to believe that a part is the whole? I have lost my soul because I have looked out of the eyes of the angels” (Mythologies, 305–6). 2. In Dear Judas, after two lines of introduction, Jesus describes “trees like columns of knobbed stone” and “the round white stone” in the garden (CP, 2:5), where the foreordained betrayal is the first action. At the beginning of Calvary the betrayal has already occurred. 3. In A Vision (1937) Yeats claimed that, while most of Christendom commemorated Easter on the first full moon after the vernal equinox, those using the Julian calendar celebrated it on the fifteenth day of the solar March rather than the more traditional lunar March, the sacrifice of Passover being observed on the fourteenth day of the lunar moon. He described March as the month of “victims and of saviours” (245). In his great wheel he associated the full moon with phase 15, the phase of complete subjectivity (81). 4. In Autobiographies Yeats cited a story by Oscar Wilde (CW, 3:224) of Christ leaving unfulfilled and hopeless the people he saved. Wilde had earlier praised “The Crucifixion of the Outcast,” a story in Yeats’s Mythologies in which monks crucify a poet (147–56). 5. Robert Zaller suggested that the line “the foundations of the world” may be a source for Cassandra’s lines in The Tower beyond Tragedy about “a tower with foundations” (CP, 1:144). 6. Yeats’s note to the play deals in part with a view he ascribes to an “old Arab,” a follower of Kusta Ben Luki, who tells Michael Robartes that all things in the world vanish into Chance and Choice, that it is easy to worship God’s Choice, but that

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“moment when I understand the immensity of His Chance is the moment when I am nearest Him” (CW, 2:697). 7. Janis Haswell outlined her theory of the soldiers dancing around Christ on the cross in patterns of the great wheel in “Resurrecting Calvary: A Reconstructive Interpretation of the Play and its Meaning.” 8. Here Yeats used the term “ger-eagle” to represent “gerfalcon,” a large northern falcon. Yeats may have been influenced by the etymology suggested by Giraldus Cambrensis that the Latin gyro-falco is derived from gyrus, referring to the circling movements of the birds in the air (CW, 2:880). Chapter 5. Rationalism and the Great Memory of the World 1. I have discussed at greater length the relationship of Yeats’s appreciation for Irish folklore and his concept of Spiritus Mundi in “A man who does not exist”: The Irish Peasant in W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge, 63–70. 2. Helen Vendler argued that the form of this poem is an extended blank-verse sonnet containing two octaves in which the speaker is first analyst and then “desperate witness” before a truncated five-line “sestet” containing first a statement of affirmation followed by a nonparallel rhetorical question asking the nature of the affirmation (Our Secret Discipline, 169–73). The choice of the form rebels against its own tradition: the momentous nature of the event requires a form employed for the dialectic of reason and emotion, but its simultaneously monstrous nature necessitates dis­ tortion. 3. For a detailed discussion of “De Rerum Virtute” and its function in the transition of Jeffers’s thinking from inhumanism to transhumanism, see Steven Chapman’s essay “De Rerum Virtute: A Critical Anatomy.” 4. Compare Jeffers’s word choice here to the language in Yeats’s “Meru” (1934), where humankind “cannot cease . . . Ravening, raging, and uprooting . . .” (CW, 1:289), and in “Lapis Lazuli” (1938), where “Hamlet rambles and Lear rages” (CW, 1:294).

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Index Adams, Henry, 48 Aeschylus, 55, 108; Oresteia, The, 12 Alcaeus, 55 Anglo-Irish War (1919–21), 57 Anima Mundi, 83, 86, 90, 91, 92, 93, 104, 105; see also Spiritus Mundi, Great Memory anthropocentrism, 84, 86, 98, 100 antimodernism, 122n4 Aristotle, 42; Aristotelian, 103

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 20, 21 Coole Park, 17, 36, 37, 123n4 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 3 Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John de, 1

Bacon, Francis, 85 Baudelaire, Charles, Painter of Modern Life, The, 14 Bauhaus, the, 14 Beowulf, 103 biosphere, 1 Berkeley, George, 85 Black and Tans, 57, 123n4 Blake, William, 13, 23, 64, 85, 89; “Milton,” 85; “Jerusalem,” 85 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 62 Buddha, 38, 39, 41, 71, 105 Buonarroti, Michelangelo. See Michelangelo Burke, Edmund, 85, 109, 113

ecocentrism, 2, 3, 98 ecodeterminism, 4 ecopoetics, 20, 23 ecoprophecy, 2, 3 Edison, Thomas Alva, 117 Eisenhower, Dwight David, 62 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 2, 14, 15, 22 Ellis, Havelock, 48, 49, 51; New Spirit, The, 48; Dance of Life, The, 48 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1 Empedocles, 65 empiricism, 83, 84 Enlightenment, 5, 14, 84, 94, 95, 121n4 environmental ethic, 1 Epicurus, 98, 99 Epicureanism, 98

Darwin, Charles, 3 Darwinian Evolutionary Theory, 1 deep ecology, 2, 13, 96, 108 Depression, 1930s, 111 Dowson, Ernest Christopher, 16

Caesar, Julius, 41, 56, 59 Callimachus, 63 Cambrensis, Giraldus (Gerald of Wales), 125n8 Carlyle, Thomas, 107, 117 Celtic Twilight, 16 Clemenceau, Georges, 43 collective unconscious, 93

Fascism, 16 Freud, Sigmund, 92 Frobenius, Leo, 66 Frost, Robert, 21, 22 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 51 Goldsmith, Oliver, 85

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Index

Gonne, Maud, 6 Grattan, Henry, 109, 113 Great Memory, 11, 14, 33, 42, 83, 86, 89–92, 94, 96, 98, 100, 102, 105–6; see also Anima Mundi, Spiritus Mundi Gregory, Lady Augusta, 9, 29, 30, 33, 36, 108, 113, 123n4

“Barren Foreland, A,” 112; “Battle (May 28, 1940),” 61; “Birds,” 18, 28; “Birthday,” 5; “Bloody Sire, The,” 66; “Boats in a Fog,” 4, 116; “Broadstone, The,” 41; “Broken Balance, The,” 48, 52, 55–57, 58, 60, 117; “Carmel Point,” 100; “Cassandra,” 46; “Coast-Range Christ, The,” 5, 6, 121n3; “Coast-Road, The,” 5, 88, 118–19; “Consciousness,” 5, 93–96, 103, 105; “Contemplation of the Sword,” 66; “Continent’s End,” 98; “Credo,” 100; “Cruelty of Love, The,” 6–7; “Cycle, The,” 54; “Dead to Clemenceau: November 1929, The,” 43; “Delusions of Saints,” 43; “De Rerum Virtute,” 93, 94, 95, 100–102, 103, 125n3; “Descent to the Dead,” 39, 44, 45, 54; “Diagram,” 61; Double Axe, The, 3; “Drunken Charlie,” 18; “Edison,” 116; “Explosion,” 66–67; “Eye, The,” 1; “Fauna,” 7; “For Una,” 8; “Gale in April,” 38; “Ghosts in England,” 43; “Giant’s Ring, The,” 41; Give Your Heart to the Hawks, 18; “Granddaughter,” 5–6; “Granite and Cypress,” 5, 37; “Gray Weather,” 26; “Great Explosion, The,” 67; “Hands,” 53; “Hellenistics,” 53, 111–12; “Her Praises,” 7; Inhumanist, The, 3; “Inscription for a Gravestone,” 43, 99; “In the Hill at Newgrange,” 41, 42–43; “Iona: The Graves of the Kings,” 43; “Irish Headland, An,” 18, 44; “I Shall Laugh Purely,” 53; “It was good of my father, whom I hated at times,” 18; “Last Conservative, The,” 108, 109; “Let Us Go Home to Paradise,” 7; “Little Scraping, A,” 34, 66, 67; “Longing, The,” 7; Love and the Hate, The, 109; “Love the Wild Swan,” 18, 21, 29–30; Loving Shepherdess, The, 72; “Low Sky, The,” 41; “Machine, The,” 116; “Maldrove,” 7; Mara, 117, 123n1; “Margrave,” 34–35; “Measure, The,” 6; “Meditation on Saviors,” 52, 71; “Metamorphosis,” 86; “Moon’s Girls, The,” 7; “Natural

Habermas, Jürgen, 121n4 Hardy, Thomas, 2, 62 Hawk Tower, 8, 9, 11, 12, 20, 28, 34, 37 Heidegger, Martin, 14; Introduction to Metaphysics, An, 14 Heraclitus, 13 Hitler, Adolf, 62, 114 Homer, 10, 11, 42, 102; Homeric, 103 humanism, 6 Industrial Revolution, 84, 85, 87 inhumanism, 3, 12, 128n3 Irish Literary Theatre, 36 Irish National Theatre, 9 Irish Republican Army, 57 James I of England, 122n4; agrarian policy, 122n4 Jeffers, Robinson, 1; books: Be Angry at the Sun, 52; Double Axe, The, 52, 61; Solstice, 47; Such Counsels You Gave to Me, 118; essays: introduction to Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, 121n1; “Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years,” 2, 13, 16–17, 69, 107; “Themes in My Poems,” 47, 115; plays: At the Birth of an Age, 47; At the Fall of an Age, 47; Bowl of Blood, The, 47; Dear Judas, 12, 69–77, 82, 124n2; Tower beyond Tragedy, The, 8, 12, 19, 47, 115, 116, 124n5; poems: “After Lake Leman,” 18; “Anima Mundi” (“The Beauty of Things”), 93, 94, 102–4; “Answer, The,” 97, 117, 119; “Antrim,” 43; “Apology for Bad Dreams,” 18, 44, 84; “As the eye fails through age or disease,” 100; “Ave Caesar,” 110;

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Index

Music,” 5–6; “Nemesis,” 7; “New Mexican Mountain,” 113; “Night,” 12; “No Resurrection,” 43; “Nova,” 100; “Now Returned Home,” 44–45, 116; “On the Lake,” 7; “Orca,” 96–97; “Original Sin,” 4; “Ossian’s Grave,” 18, 39–41; “Palace, The,” 8; “Palinode,” 57; “Philosophy, A,” 7; “Place for No Story, The,” 26; “Point Joe,” 2, 37–38; “Point Pinos and Point Lobos,” 17, 38; “Prescription of Painful Ends,” 52, 55; “Purse-Seine, The,” 53–54, 74, 75, 115; “Real and Half Real,” 61–62; “Rearmament,” 60–61, 62; “Redeemer, A,” 8; “Reference to a Passage in Plutarch’s Life of Sulla,” 55; Roan Stallion, 12, 71, 96; “Salt Sand,” 7; “Science,” 116; “Shakespeare’s Grave,” 43; “Shane O’Neill’s Cairn,” 39; “Shine, Empire,” 74, 111; “Shine, Perishing Republic,” 34, 54, 74, 88, 109, 111; “Shine, Republic,” 14, 74, 88, 110; “Shooting Season,” 43; “Sign-Post,” 71, 97, 99, 116; “Sirens,” 114; “Something Remembered,” 7; “Songs of the Dead Men to the Three Dancers, The,” 8; “Staggering Back toward Life,” 117; “Still the Mind Smiles,” 114; “Storm as Deliverer,” 8; “Subjected Earth,” 43, 93; Tamar, 26; “Thebaid,” 114; “Theory of Truth,” 52, 71, 73; “To a Young Artist,” 12; “To Canidia,” 7–8; “To Death,” 2; “To Helen about Her Hair,” 7; “To Helen, Whose Remembrance Leaves No Peace,” 7; “Torch-Bearer’s Race, The,” 55; “Tor House,” 8, 19, 37; “To the Children,” 56; “To the House,” 5, 34; “To the Rock That Will Be a Cornerstone of the House,” 19; “To the Stone-Cutters,” 19; “Urchin, The,” 67–68; “What Are Cities For?,” 53, 114, 123n5; “What’s the best life for a man?,” 117–18; “Wind-Struck Music, The,” 118; “Winged Rock,” 35; “Year of Mourning, The,” 122n3 Jeffers, Una, 2, 11, 20, 123n5, 123n6 Jefferson, Thomas, 1, 112; Jeffersonian, 112

Joachim of Fiore (also Joachim de Fiore, Joachim de Flora, Gioacchino da Fiore), 51 Jonson, Ben; “To Penshurst,” 37, 122n4 Joyce, James, 13, 14, 15; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A, 13 Jung, Carl Gustav, 90, 92, 93, 102; Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, 93; Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 93 Keats, John, 89; “Bright star! Would I were steadfast as thou art,” 85 Lane, Hugh, 113 Le Corbusier (Charles-Edoward Jeanneret-Gris), 14 Lecky, William Edward Hartpole, 23; History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, A, 23 Lissadell House, 29, 36 Locke, John, 84, 85, 86–88, 89, 98, 103; Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An, 86–87; “Of Knowledge and Probability,” 87; Second Treatise of Government, book 2 of An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government, 87 London, Jack, 22 Lucretius, 55, 98–99, 100; De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things), 98, 99, 100 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 9 Marvell, Andrew; “Upon Appleton House,” 122n4 Marx, Karl, 114 Michelangelo, 102, 108 Midlands Revolt of 1607, 122n4 Milton, John, 11 Modernism, 2, 4, 14–15, 20, 32, 46, 121–122n4 modernity, 14, 121n4, 122n4 Monroe, Harriet, 2 Moore, George, 2

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Index

Moore, Sturge, 17, 32, 49 More, Henry, 86, 91 Morris, William, 23, 24, 107 Muir, John, 1 Newton, Isaac, 85 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 13, 14, 19, 47, 48, 50, 51–52, 56, 121n4, 123n2; Nietzschean, 14, 56, 62, 64, 65, 66, 71, 77, 78; Thus Spake Zarathustra, 51, 65; Übermensch, 51, 80; Will to Power, The, 52 Noh Theatre of Japan, 69, 70 O’Brien, Donogh, 26 Odum, Eugene, 101 O’Leary, John, 17, 107, 113 O’Sullivan, Owen Rua, 32 Paleolithic nature worship, 1, 4 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 113 pastoralism, 27, 84 Petrie, William Matthew Flinders, 48, 49; Revolutions of Civilization, The, 48 Phidias, 58 Pirandello, Luigi, 15 Plato, 11, 42, 55, 66 Platonic year, 59 Plutarch; “Life of Sulla,” 48 Pre-Raphaelites, 6 Pound, Ezra, 4, 14, 15, 70 Raftery, Anthony, 18, 32, 36 rationalism, 84, 86 Renaissance, 94, 95; Italian, 109 Rising of 1916, 25 Rohe, Mies van der, 14 Romanticism, 6, 20, 30, 32, 84 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 2 Ruskin, John, 107

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 9, 11, 24, 25, 46, 89, 91; Laon and Cyntha, 9; Prometheus Unbound, 59 Snyder, Gary, 101, 108; Practice of the Wild, The, 108; “Wilderness, The,” 101 Soloviev, V. S. (Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov), 24 Sophocles, 62 Spengler, Oswald, 47, 48, 49–51, 54, 64, 66, 123n1, 123n5, 124n8; Decline of the West, The, 48, 49–50, 51; “Act and Portrait,” 64 Spenser, Edmund, 23, 24 Spiritus Mundi, 83, 90, 92, 105, 106, 125n1; see also Anima Mundi, Great Memory Steinbeck, John, 22 Stevens, Wallace, 4, 15, 21, 22; “Idea of Order at Key West, The,” 21 Swift, Jonathan, 85 Synge, John Millington, 108 Thoor Ballylee, 9, 10–11, 12, 19, 20, 31, 36, 119 Thoreau, Henry David, 27 Tolstoy, Leo, 62 Tor House, 3, 11, 12, 20, 34, 37 Treaty of Versailles, 43 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 1 utilitarianism, 88 Vico, Giovanni Battista, 48, 49

Sappho, 55 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 122n4 Shakespeare, William, 23, 42, 63, 89, 102, 105; Macbeth, 63, 102 Shawe-Taylor, John, 113

Washington, George, 42 Whitman, Walt, 1, 2, 4, 46, 98, 102; Whitmanesque, 91, 105; “Facing West from California’s Shores,” 1 Wilde, Oscar, 124n4 Williams, William Carlos, 4, 21, 22 Woolf, Virginia, 14 Wordsworth, William, 13, 20, 21, 98, 105, 118; “Intimations,” 98; “Michael,” 118 Wright brothers (Wilbur and Orville), 62 Wyndham Land Act (1903), 113

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Index

Yeats, William Butler, 2; books: Autobiographies, 124n4; Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics, The, 7; John Sherman, 122n1; Letters to the New Island, 21, 91; Memoirs, 24; Michael Robartes and the Dancer, 10; Mythologies, 124n4; New Poems, 65; Rose, The, 95; Tower, The, 8, 10, 22, 57; Vision, A, 19, 47, 48, 49, 51, 61—1925 version, 15, 20, 49—1937 version, 66, 70, 124n3; Wild Swans at Coole, The, 10, 33, 36; Wind among the Reeds, The, 7, 8; Winding Stair, The, 10, 33, 36; essays: “Anima Mundi,” 91; “Art and Ideas,” 13, 25; “Away,” 89–90 ; “By the Roadside,” 89; “Celtic Element in Literature, The,” 13, 23–24; Dramatis Personnae, 36; “Edmund Spenser,” 24; Estrangement, 16; “Four Years: 1887–1891,” 25, 51, 122n2; “Galway Plains, The,” 17; “General Introduction for My Work, A,” 15, 23, 31; “Hodos Cameliontos,” 83, 86; “Holy Places, The,” 24; “If I Were Four-and-Twenty,” 25; “Ireland and the Arts,” 17, 89; “Magic,” 89, 90; “Message of the Folk-lorist, The,” 89, 90; Pages from a Diary 1930, 88; Per Amica Silentia Lunae, 91; “Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry, The,” 9–10, 91; “Symbolism of Poetry, The,” 13; “Tables of the Law, The,” 78; Trembling of the Veil, The, 17, 122n2; “Tower on the Apennines, A,” 10; plays: At the Hawks Well, 8, 25; Cavalry, 8, 69, 70, 72, 77–82, 124n2, 125n7; Cat and the Moon, The, 25; Dreaming of the Bones, The, 8, 25–26, 70; Four Plays for Dancers, 8; Only Jealousy of Emer, The, 8; Resurrection, The, 13, 59; Shadowy Waters, The, 22, 30; poems: “Among School Children,” 2, 8, 42, 59; “Ancestral Houses,” 113; “At Galway Races,” 22; “Black Tower, The,” 13; “Byzantium,” 66; “Cold Heaven, The,” 8; “Coole and Ballylee, 1931,” 15, 17, 22, 36, 109; “Coole Park, 1929,” 22,

30, 36; “Crazy Jane and the Bishop,” 25; “Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea,” 34; “Dolls, The,” 61; “Double Vision of Michael Robartes, The,” 18, 22, 41; “Easter, 1916,” 22, 60; “Ego Dominus Tuus,” 9, 10; “Fascination of What’s Difficult, The,” 70; “Fiddler of Dooney, The,” 22; “Fisherman, The,” 38, 114; “Fragments,” 84–86, 87, 88; “Gyres, The,” 49, 65–66; “He Bids His Beloved Be at Peace,” 18; “He Remembers Forgotten Beauty,” 13, 18; “He Reproves the Curlew,” 8; “He Thinks of His Past Greatness When a Part of the Constellations of Heaven,” 25; “Hosting of the Sidhe, The,” 22; “Host of the Air, The,” 5, 34; “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz,” 22; “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” 10, 22; “In the Seven Woods,” 22, 30; “Irish Airman Foresees His Death, An,” 22; “Lake Isle of Innisfree, The,” 22, 24; “Lapis Lazuli,” 15, 62–64, 65, 114, 125n4; “Long-Legged Fly,” 49; “Lover Asks Forgiveness Because of His Many Moods, The,” 7, 18; “Man and the Echo,” 8; “Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland, The,” 22, 29, 31; “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” 15, 33, 34, 40, 55, 113; “Meru,” 65, 67, 125n4; “Michael Robartes and the Dancer,” 18; “Michael Robartes Bids His Beloved Be at Peace,” 122n5; “Michael Robartes Remembers Forgotten Beauty,” 122n5; “My House,” 19, 33; “Mountain Tomb, The,” 8, 22; “Municipal Gallery Revisited,” 108; “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” 55, 56, 57–60, 61, 66;“Owen Aherne and His Dancers,” 18; “Phases of the Moon, The,” 9, 10, 18, 19, 63, 123n2; “Poet to His Beloved, A,” 7; “Politics,” 5; “Prayer for My Daughter, A,” 6; “Prayer on Going into My House, A,” 10, 112–13; “Road at My Door, The,” 40; “Sailing to Byzantium,” 5, 8, 49, 123n2; “Second Coming, The,”

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Index

Yeats, William Butler, poems, (continued) 60, 61, 67, 92, 123n1, 125n2; “September, 1913,” 109; Shadowy Waters, The, introductory verses to, 22, 30, 95; “Song of the Happy Shepherd, The,” 6; “Song of Wandering Aengus, The,” 7, 25; “Stare’s Nest by My Window, The,” 34; “Statues, The,” 2; “Stream and Sun at Glendalough,” 22; “Supernatural Songs,” 65; “Three Bushes, The,” 61; “To a Child Dancing in the Wind,” 5; “To an Isle in the Water,” 22; “To a Shade,” 22; “To a Squirrel at Kylena-no,” 30; “To a Wealthy Man Who

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Promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery If It Were Proved the People Wanted Pictures,” 113; “To Be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee,” 19; “Tower, The,” 22, 31–32, 33, 34, 41, 122n3; “Two Songs from a Play,” 68; “Two Years Later,” 5; “Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation,” 22, 113, 123n4; Wanderings of Oisin, The, 24, 39, 40, 95; “When You Are Old,” 6–7; “Who Goes with Fergus?,” 7; “Wild Swans at Coole, The,” 18, 22, 29, 30, 82; story: “Crucifixion of the Outcast,”124n4