![]() ![]() But the astronomical toll of death and destruction that the war brought shocked him out of his naïve romanticism and he came to view that catastrophic event - and the very idea of war - with horror. During the First World War he had tried unsuccessfully to enlist as a pilot but because he was already in his thirties he was rejected for being too old. It is not impossible that it was precisely this empathy and compassion that account for his poetry’s unwavering focus on the world’s cruelty, man’s savagery, and his nation’s destructive history.Īs early as 1923, in “Shine, Perishing Republic,” Jeffers was warning that America was settling “into the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,” and he was advising his sons to “keep their distance from the thickening center” (“Shine, Perishing Republic” CP 1: 15). But what has remained perhaps least noted in his work is another quality shared by few of his contemporaries - a large-spirited compassion for his fellow beings, a compassion that does not exclude our non-human brethren. Nonetheless he still has an impressive number of passionate readers and advocates, and the most appealing of his poetry is by no means in danger of being forgotten. “No major American poet,” Dana Gioia has commented, “has been treated worse by posterity than Robinson Jeffers. ![]() Although his screeds against humanity’s cruelty, America’s imperial designs, and the human degradation of the environment do not, these days, seem very wide of the mark, he has not regained the stature he once had and stands notably apart, both philosophically and aesthetically, from the modernist giants of twentieth-century American verse. His refusal to write in the elusive modernist manner of his contemporaries, his lack of patriotic fervor during the Second World War, his grave reservations concerning the nobility of humanity, his insistent condemnation of mankind’s congenital cruelties, his disparagement of man’s primacy in the cosmic order, and the long shadow of misanthropy that fell across the entire body of his work were hardly designed to endear him to the critics and reviewers of his era. Take, for example, the case of Robinson Jeffers. ![]() In the most benign form of punishment, such writers are simply disparaged by critics, and the reading public is discouraged from paying attention to their works. Today, Forough Farroughzad’s sexually transgressive poetry is banned by the Iranian Islamic Republic. Roque Dalton was murdered, or so it is generally believed, by internecine warfare among his fellow revolutionaries. Garcia Lorca was murdered by the Spanish fascists for being a homosexual and a communist. Cesar Pavese, Kim Chi Ha, Juan Ramon Hernandez, Irina Ratushinskaya are among the many poets of our century to be imprisoned. Richard Wright, Rafael Alberti, Joseph Brodsky, Juan Gelman and Czeslaw Milosz are just a few of the poets of our era who suffered exile. In Turkey, Nazim Hikmet served decades in prison and was then forced into exile when he refused to fight in the US-sponsored Korean genocide. But they dared not arrest him, he was too famous instead, they threw his wife into a work camp to teach him the virtues of silence. Osip Mandelstam disappeared forever into the gulag, Anna Akhmatova’s verse was banned, Boris Pasternak was forced to turn down the Nobel Prize because he could not avoid depicting the pathological nightmare of the Soviet state. When it is politic to mouth chauvinistic homilies and genuflect to the tribal gods, those seditious writers and dissidents are ever in danger of being torn apart by the hounds of Hell, the beasts who guard the gates of propriety ― as Euripides, who terrified his Athenian countrymen by showing them the savage face behind the veil of their self-aggrandizing myths, is rumored to have been so torn apart. If Nietzsche was correct when he observed that the poets lie too much, it is also true that now and again a poet emerges who articulates truths so incendiary and forbidden that the guardians of the public good cannot help but be disconcerted. “The passion for truth is the faintest of all human passions.” ― A. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |