Robinson Jeffers Today: Beyond Good and Beneath Evil

Abstract

O`N MARCH 3, 194I, Robinson Jeffers read from his poetry a %-J large audience in Emerson Hall, Harvard University. room seated four hundred, but many more crowded the halls outside. next day I drove Jeffers visit Emerson's Concord and Walden Pond, and in conversation inquired the title of his next book. Beyond Good and Evil, he replied; and when I did not hear well, he added: Nietzsche. Nine months later his new book bore the title, Be Angry at the Sun; and on December 7 Pearl Harbor exploded. At that time the incident did not seem very important. title poem of the new volume translated the Nietzschean idea into poetic language, while it recalled the German of Spengler (mentioned in another poem), whose Untergang des Abendlandes announced the setting sun of all Western civilization. But after Pearl Harbor the new volume seemed almost treasonous: one poem coupled with Hitler as equal instigators of the new world war: Roosevelt by grandiose good intentions, cajolery / And public funds, . . . Hitler by fanatic / Patriotism, frank lies, genius and terror. This seemed too much. When The Bowl of Blood sought imagine Hitler as a kind of tragic hero, in order to present contemporary things in the shape of eternity, most people stopped reading Jeffers. Now more than a generation later, 1941 looms as a watershed in American history. But it also marks a watershed in the history of Jeffers's reputation. In March, 1941, his popularity had reached its highest point (although some critics had been denouncing him since the publication of Women at Point Sur in 1927). But after Pearl Harbor his attempts argue that The cause is far beyond good and evil, / Men fight and their cause is not the effectively destroyed his reputation. At the very moment when Americans most needed believe in the absolute goodness of their cause, Jeffers