Robinson Jeffers' Tragedies as Rediscoveries of the World

RobinsonJeffers' Tragedies as Rediscoveries ofthe World ROBERT IAN SCOTT The less expected the message, the more it tells us, or might if we would believe what asks us to change, challenging our self-esteem. Hence perhaps the resentment of Jeffers' poems, which say we need to see the world beyond ourselves to escape our delusions of importance and the misery and violence they cause. We may claim unwelcome messages make no sense. Yvor Winters did, in saying Jeffers' pantheism, and use of violence and the language of science leave his poems no coherent plots or metaphors, and his characters no moral choices or meaning.1 But why should seeing the world as God, or writing tragedies, or using scientific language or discoveries have such an effect? Winters offered no evidence, beyond suggesting that only those who believe whatever Winters did could write coherently, or make or describe moral choices. He seemed to think that if we understand the world by seeing what causes have which results, and thus make our choices pragmatically rather than dogmatically, we cannot choose, as if our morality and freedom increase with ignorance. Robert Ian Scott (Department of English, University of Saskatchewan) is currently working on Robinson Jeffers' unpublished poems and his religious use of scientific discoveries. "Yvor Winters, "Robinson Jeffers," Poetry, XXXV (February, 1930), 279-286; H. H. Waggoner , "Science and the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers," American Literature, 10, 3 (November, 1938), and The Heel of Elohim (University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), pp. 105-132. Josephine Miles' The Primary Language of Poetry in the I940's and Eras and Modes in English Poetry (University of California Press, 1951 and 1964) show that Winters and Waggoner reacted subjectively, ignoring their evidence, Jeffers' language; Robert Ian Scott's "Robinson Jeffers' Poetic Use of Post-Copernican Science" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1964) disproves Winters' and Waggoner's claims that Jeffers used scientific language unpoetically and misrepresented scientific discoveries; J. Robert Harris' "Robinson Jeffers' Poetic Definitions of God" (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 1970) shows how Jeffers defined the universe as God. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW147 The opposite seems more true: we cannot know what any choice means, and cannot act responsibly, until we know what causes a situation , what choices we can make, and what results each choice will have. By tracing past cause-result relationships, we may learn to understand future ones. We can learn from past violence and other experiments to foresee the future more accurately, and thus make more satisfying or at least less costly choices. Because Jeffers' long narrative poems present examples of violent behavior best not repeated, they can encourage such learning, and the more so because these narratives and his shorter poems use not the language but the discoveries of science, to explain why we act as we do, and how else we could behave. To do so, Jeffers used the devices of language poets generally do—plots, metaphors, and ironic contrasts between our pretensions and our performance, and especially between our self-esteem and our petty place in the world these discoveries reveal. Despite such facts, H. H. Waggoner and other critics go on repeating Winters' attack, perhaps because they also resent discoveries that make some of our most flattering opinions of ourselves obviously inaccurate. Twenty-two centuries ago, Aristarchus of Samos saw that we are not the center of the universe, but merely on one of several planets moving around the sun, and Democritus saw the universe, us included, as all predictably changing structures of atoms in otherwise empty space. For more than three centuries now, scientists since Copernicus have confirmed both theories in more and more systematic and precisely factual ways which can help us behave morally, because doing so depends on seeing ourselves and our situation accurately enough to foresee the consequences of our behavior. Apparently Jeffers did; his poems contain some remarkably accurate predictions, such as the motive and method of Hitler's suicide, clearly and publicly stated nearly four years before it happened.2 Perhaps we expect too much in supposing that literary critics would learn some science before they call Jeffers' use of it inaccurate or un1...