The "Savior" in the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers

Abstract

(NE OF concepts which appears most frequently in ~ poetry of Robinson Jeffers is that of Savior. By a process of logical deduction from his fundamental philosophical assump tions, Savior comes to represent a spirit of opposition to good, almost devil of Jeffers's cosmogony. And yet poet's attitude toward saviortype is slightly ambiguous, for conflict between his acquired intellectual system and his Christian inheritance has not been entirely resolved. His father, William Hamilton Jeffers, was a professor in a theological seminary and had been a preacher before his son's birth. Jeffers's affection and reverence for him are clearly shown in long ode, Year of Mourning, published in early volume Californians (I9I6). In it he praises virtues found in his father which he was coming to admire as central, calm, serenity, strength, and sternness, and that love of truth which had led him to make broad the beautiful steep highways of mind. The elder Jeffers's aspiration not only to find truth but to make it prevail in world, aspiration of preacher, prophet or messiah, made its impress on mind of poet and has never wholly deserted him. But tenets of orthodox Christianity, which sufficed father, were early found to be wholly untenable by son. The study of modern science and psychology persuaded him that doctrines of fatherhood of God, sacredness of human personality and man's central place in scheme of things had no foundation in fact. He turned to a faith diametrically opposite, to a conviction of utter insignificance of man and even of life itself, and of folly and futility of a devotion to man's preservation and salvation. But a creed made up of negations can be satisfactory to no one, least of all to a poet. Although his surrender, not only of all supernatural but also purely human values of Christianity, is extraordinarily complete, Jeffers finds an object of worship in vast inhuman universe, in beauty of mountain