Reviewed by: Towers of Myth and Stone: Yeats’s Influence on Robinson Jeffers by Deborah Fleming Terence Diggory Deborah Fleming, Towers of Myth and Stone: Yeats’s Influence on Robinson Jeffers. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2015. 152pp. Cloth, $39.95; e-book, $38.99. Despite the subtitle, Deborah Fleming’s study of Yeats and Jeffers offers a broad comparison rather than a narrowly focused analysis of influence. Although the Norman tower that Yeats restored in the west of Ireland influenced Jeffers’s building of a tower on the California coast, the meanings each poet assigned to his tower are as different as the “myth” and “stone” of Fleming’s title. As Gilbert Allen observed, in a contrast that Fleming cites repeatedly (20, 107, 119), Yeats is grounded in culture (myth) whereas Jeffers is grounded in geology (stone). Ultimately, the difference appears to be more significant than the initial influence. For the sake of comparison Fleming sometimes overlooks the difference, as when she attempts to enlist Yeats in the service of “ecopoetics” (20, 23), a category that critics have recently employed to demonstrate Jeffers’s contemporary [End Page 365] relevance. In contrast to Jeffers, the poet who sought, in “Sailing to Byzantium,” to voyage “out of nature” described his stance toward nature as “antithetical.” In producing the first book-length study of the relation between Yeats and Jeffers, Fleming has not so much extended as collected previous studies (including, I should acknowledge, my own). Her work is organized around a few major themes: prophetic denunciation of modernity from the standpoint of “radical traditionalism” (Fleming’s term); landscape as setting and the isolated hero as actor; eternal recurrence (à la Nietzsche) and “great memory” (akin to Jung’s collective unconscious) as the basis for patterns in history (both natural and cultural) and in consciousness. The role of common influences such as Nietzsche and Jung further complicates the simple trajectory of “Yeats’s influence on Robinson Jeffers,” although Fleming gives little thought to this complication. Overall, her emphasis on “Yeats’s and Jeffers’s poetic and social philosophies” (2) distracts her attention from how the poems work as poems: Yeats typically dramatizes his philosophy while Jeffers tends to preach his. This may be the principal reason that Yeats’s standing as a poet remains much higher than Jeffers’s, despite the complaints of Jeffers’s advocates that he is unjustly neglected. It is also the reason why Yeats’s influence on Jeffers can be felt most strongly in his dramatic work, especially the play Dear Judas, the subject of a comparison with Yeats’s Calvary to which Fleming appropriately devotes an entire chapter. In Jeffers’s own view, as Fleming notes, Yeats became a great poet because he had the opportunity to write for a nation (17). The method of comparison inevitably leads to the question of Jeffers’s relation to his nation. Unfortunately, Fleming tends to reduce this question to the sense of place in Jeffers’s poetry, which makes him into a regionalist rather than a national poet. But Fleming’s ultimate goal, it seems, is to present Jeffers as an environmentalist. In her book’s first paragraph she declares—too hastily, in my view—a number of theories of American identity to be inapplicable to Jeffers. Then comes the pivotal sentence: “Jeffers’s writings seem to voice Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman-farmer ideal and isolationism, but far more imminent in his poetry is the doctrine of wilderness perhaps best articulated by Max Oelschlaeger [in The Idea of Wilderness] [End Page 366] as that set of beliefs derived from Paleolithic nature worship and augmented by Darwinian evolutionary theories” (1). In other words, communion with nature, by means either of religion or of science, counts more in Jeffers’s work than cultural community. It may be that Jeffers himself would embrace this distinction, but critics of Jeffers are obliged to test its validity against the obvious fact that religion and science are as much the products of culture as is nationality. So the question of Jeffers’s nationality resurfaces as soon as we recognize that his view of nature is in some way culturally mediated—even, to use a Yeatsian term...
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Aug 20, 2024
Sergio Arias 
Open Access