In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Book Reviews115 These lines, from a poem by Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), entitled "Rock and Hawk," serve as the epigraph for this book. The poem recounts Jeffers' experience of seeing a falcon perched upon a weather-worn rock. He reflects upon the "bright power" and "dark peace," the "Fierce consciousness joined with final/Disinterestedness," and sees in this coincidence of opposites a fitting symbol for the life-force that animates the natural world. It is as a tribute to Jeffers that William Nolte uses these same lines to refer to the poet himself, a man in whom the unclouded vision of a realist and the insight of a mystic were conjoined, a man for whom fame was not a primary concern. Jeffers looked closely at the age in which he lived and wrote poems which alternately angered, frightened, and fascinated his readers. His work is preoccupied with two great themes: the awesome beauty of nature and the relative insignificance of mankind. His evocation of the place in which he lived — the Monterey peninsula on the rugged northern California coast — ranks among the best nature poetry ever written just as his often strident denunciation of mankind is considered some of the most misanthropic verse ever penned. Jeffers saw a "strain in the wounded minds of men" that "leaves them no peace," a strain that is summed up in the word "egotism." This is the "romantic agony" of which Nolte speaks — a condition ofexistence that is characterized by selfcenteredness at the individual level and anthropocentricism at the level of race. The symptoms of this pathological maladaptation to life can be seen in a pervasive human selfishness, in the wanton disregard people have for other forms of life, in our plunder of the natural world, and in our abnormal capacity for cruelty. Health, for Jeffers, if you read his poetry with a therapeutic eye, or salvation, if you are sensitive to religious themes, comes when we "uncenter our minds from ourselves" and turn outward to love the "transhuman magnificence" of the universe at large. Only then can we appreciate the fact that "Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is/Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe." "Love that," Jeffers prescribes, "not man apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions, or drown in despair when his days darken." Nolte's book is an eloquent and perceptive study of the themes that characterize Jeffers' work. Rather than looking for the sources from which Jeffers drew or attacking the interpretations of scholars who have written before him, Nolte offers his own insight concerning the meaning and importance of Jeffer's poetry. His achievement is considerable; his book should serve as an introduction and aguide to Jeffers for many years to come. JAMES KARMAN California State University, Chico Stephen Railton. Fenimore Cooper: A Study ofHis Life and Imagination. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978. 282p. Stephen Railton's biographical study of Fenimore Cooper builds its argument with the tools of Freudian psychoanalysis. Cooper's directive that his personal papers be destroyed limits the materials available for such a biography, particularly since little remains from the crucial early years, but Railton makes effective use of surviving journals and letters in conjunction with close readings of the fiction. His study seeks to explain the "psychic coherence" integratingCooper the romancer and 116ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW Cooper the acerb social commentator. It is a critical commonplace that Cooper was inconsistent about the desired outcomes of confrontations between nature and civilization, freedom and law, the individual and society. Railton argues, however, that those personal and thematic ambivalences are psychologically coherent when the development of Cooper's identity is traced first in struggle, then in submission to his father. The transition from struggle to submission, Railton suggests, is precipitated by Cooper's loss of popularity as a novelist in the early 1830s. So long as the public validated him, Cooper could resist the authority of his father; when the public turned its back, Cooper returned home to become "a Cooper of Cooperstown," a dutiful son to a powerful patriarch. The outlines of the argument are conventional enough, given the determinism of...

pdf

Share