Essay Review

Abstract

Essay Review Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems by Robinson Jeffers. Edited by Robert Hass. (New York: Random House, 1977. 292 pages, $21.00.) Robinson Jeffers and the Critics, 1912-1983: A Bibliography of Secondary Sources with Selective Annotations. By Jeanetta Boswell. (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1986. 170 pages, $18.50.) Robinson Jeffers, Poet of California. By James Karman. (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1987. 160 pages, $5.95.) The Enduring Voice: A Tor House Journal. By John Dotson. (San Luis Obispo, CA: Mariposa Press, 1987. 136 pages, $12.00.) 1987 marked Robinson Jeffers’s centennial. At Occidental College, his alma mater, lectures, symposia, readings, drama, and dance celebrated his January 10th birthday. Poets William Everson, Gary Snyder, Czeslaw Milosz, William Stafford, Diane Wakoski, and Alan Williamson feted him at San Jose State University and at Carmel in October with readings and evaluations. The centennial saw an impressive outpouring of publications. Foremost was the selected short poems, Rock and Hawk, edited by poet-critic Robert Hass, the first comprehensive gathering from the poet’s overall career and the first collection since the Vintage Selected Poems in 1965. Hass treats the reader to a lyrical, probing introduction reflecting on Jeffers the man and the myth, and focusing on his achievement—his Cassandra voice, his reconciling the cruelty of nature, his intense identification with the cosmic splendor— all these encompassed, sometimes agonizingly, in famous lyrics such as “Shine, Perishing Republic,” “Ante Mortem,” “November Surf,” and “Fire on the Hills,” dealing with the cycle of nations, the hazards of living, disgust with the human race, and the intense beauty of natural violence. Although Hass wisely chooses to limit his selection to short lyrics, he does note well Jeffers’smajor narrative efforts as in “Tamar,” “Cawdor,” and “The Women at Point Sur,” and his lesser known contributions to the stage in “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” “Dear Judas,” and “Medea.” These narrative and dramatic genres are represented in Hass’s book by the relatively brief “Roan Stallion,” “The Humanist’s Tragedy,” and “Hungerfield.” The exclusion of longer works allows space for one hundred nineteen lyrics revealing the amaz­ ingly wide range of Jeffers’s moods and subjects, voices and virtuosity. Inevitably in a selection, even one this large, there are anomalies of exclu­ sion. Why does Hass choose “Pelicans” but not “Night”? “The Stone Axe” but not “Signpost”? “Pearl Harbor” and “Ink-Sack” but not “Cassandra” or “Original Sin”? The answer, of course, lies in personal taste and the desire 368 Western American Literature to include less accessible poems. Some significant Jeffers poems are collected here for the first time or are available from no other collection in print: “Love Children,” “Pelicans,” “Credo,” “October Week-End,” “Come, Little Birds,” “The Day is a Poem,” “Orca,” and “Patronymic,” to name a few. In the printing of the volume, however, there is one serious flaw. Fortynine crucial verses of the lyric introduction to “Hungerfield” were lost some­ where in the process of making and editing galleys. The loss is particularly unfortunate since these lines present a rare self-revelation by Jeffers, an agon­ ized attempt to reconcile himself to the death of his wife, extremely powerful verse and uncollected since publication in 1954. Simultaneous with publication of Rock and Hawk, came the release in England of Robinson Jeffers, Selected Poems: A Centenary Edition, edited by English poet and critic Colin Falck at Carcanet Press, Manchester (109 pages, £6.95), including sixty-four poems culled from the best of Jeffers’s Selected Poetry (1938) and his five subsequent volumes. The edition is a gem, although the aficionado will again find favorites missing, such as “To His Father,” “Natural Music,” “Continent’s End,” “Woodrow Wilson,” “The Place for No Story,” or “Fire on the Hills.” In a very appreciative introduction, Falck locates Jeffers in the context of his poetic age, remarks the vagaries of his detractors, Marxist, Humanist, and New Critic, and then assesses his real strengths and weaknesses, the breadth of his vision and challenge of his philo­ sophical frame. He sees Jeffers as the romantic heir of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, beholden at the same time to Nietzsche, Wordsworth, and Calvin. A third selected poems...