Inventing the Language to Tell It: Robinson Jeffers and the Biology of Consciousness

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Jeffers, Collected Poetry (hereafter CP), 4:552; subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. Tim Hunt identifies The Carmelite as the source of the questionnaire, which gathered information “for its December 12, 1928, ‘Robinson Jeffers Supplement’” (CP 5:1048) and prints Jeffers’s drafted answers, from which I quote. In Jeffers, Collected Letters (hereafter CL; subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text by volume and page number), James Karman includes Una’s additional answers to the questionnaire but does not identify the correspondent as The Carmelite (CL 1:768–80). 2. Gelpi, Coherent Splendor, 439. 3. Edmundson, Literature against Philosophy, 17. For Edmundson, contextualization privileges history, philosophy, or theory over art: “I have no doubt that texts need, to a certain degree, to be read within their historical contexts. . . . But how much one contextualizes a work of art is a matter of some delicacy, an issue of taste. It takes considerable poise and intellectual honesty not to use historical context as another way to engage in the philosophical disenfranchisement of art” (16). 4. Gelpi, foreword to Everson, Excesses of God, xi. 5. Everson, introduction to Jeffers, Cawdor/Medea, ix, vii−viii. 6. Residing in California for his entire adult life, Jeffers was, of course, very distant from the centers of modernism, and there is good reason to see him as isolated in terms of literary history. Nonetheless, he was aware of the modernist movement through its “little magazines” and his and his wife’s correspondents. In a letter to her friend Hazel Pinkham, Una Jeffers refers to reading Sherwood Anderson’s serialized novel Many Marriages in The Dial (CL 1:450), and Karman points out that the November 1922 issue, in which one of the novel’s chapters 144 / notes appeared, also contained the first American publication of The Waste Land (CL 1:452 n. 10). 7. Assmann, “Exorcising the Demon,” 14. 8. Ibid., 23. 9. A related discussion of Jeffers and Eliot can be found in John Elder’s Imagining the Earth. In the first chapter, he observes, “Eliot and Jeffers glimpse reconciliations beyond the apparent logic of human history. But both poets find it hard to relate such visions to the present circumstances of civilization” (20). 10. Surette, Birth of Modernism, 218. 11. The prime example of Jeffers’s occult interest is his account of a visit to a medium in “Come Little Birds” (CP 3:5–9). Though he expresses no skepticism regarding such preternatural phenomena, he describes them in such a matter-of-fact way that one wonders how far his credulity extends. Robert Kafka (“Lighthouse-Keeper’s Daughter ,” 45) notes that critics can read Jeffers either way on this point: Robert Brophy considers Jeffers a scientific rationalist, yet Deborah Fleming presents an equally plausible case for Jeffers as an antirationalist in the mode of Yeats. As Materer observes, “Yeats’s mixture of skepticism and naïveté is characteristic of occultists. . . . Depending on their orientation, critics like to emphasize one side or another of [his] vacillation” (Modernist Alchemy, 1). 12. Surette, Birth of Modernism, 13. 13. Materer, Modernist Alchemy, xiv, 4. 14. Ibid., 8, 7. 15. Langbaum, “New Nature Poetry,” 331, 324. 16. Scott, Wild Prayer of Longing, 9. 17. Ibid., 20–21. 18. Ibid., 51. 19. Ibid., 117. 20. Brophy, Robinson Jeffers, 5. 21. Davidson, San Francisco Renaissance, 58; Altieri, Enlarging the Temple, 129. 22. By this I mean works of environmental history and philosophy that examine environmentalism as a secular faith. A different approach is that of ecotheology, which seeks ways of connecting traditional religions with environmentalist concerns. An example of the latter is Gottlieb’s Greener Faith. 23. Dunlap, Faith in Nature, 13. John Gatta’s sense that the American literary tradition both discovers and invents nature as sacred is also relevant to my argument , but he has little to say about Jeffers’s contribution. He writes, “I think it most fruitful . . . to imagine ‘nature’ as something both authentically discovered, or discoverable , and humanly constructed. The same is true of our reaction to nature as divine Creation” (Making Nature Sacred, 10). Nevertheless, though he acknowledges that this topic is too large and his historical scope too extensive to include every major figure in this tradition (7), Gatta’s single comment on Jeffers indicates only a stereotypical view of his work. The “religious ecopoetic of recent nature poetry,” he writes, “looks to incorporate, but to pass beyond, Jeffers’s misanthropic philosophy of ‘inhumanism’” (227...