Most Read... Rebecca WattsThe Cult of the Noble Amateur
(PN Review 239)
John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Joshua WeinerAn Exchange with Daniel Tiffany/Fall 2020
(PN Review 259)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Next Issue Kirsty Gunn re-arranges the world John McAuliffe reads Seamus Heaney's letters and translations Chris Price's 'Songs of Allegiance' David Herman on Aharon Appelfeld Victoria Moul on Christopher Childers compendious Greek and Latin Lyric Book Philip Terry again answers the question, 'What is Poetry'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
Reader Survey
PN Review Substack

This article is taken from PN Review 58, Volume 14 Number 2, November - December 1987.

Robinson Jeffers: American Romantic Colin Falck


It was a world before and after the
God of Love
.
D.H. Lawrence, St. Mawr


ROBINSON JEFFERS'S current neglect tells us more about the present state of our literary fashions than about any of the real strengths or weaknesses of his work. Such literary movements as Franco-American post-structuralist theory, or the wave of ingenious simile-mongering which recently overtook British verse, or the general "post-modernist" tendency for literature to be about language, or about itself, rather than about the world we live in, might be seen as symptoms of the same evasion of reality - the same loss of spiritual nerve - which Jeffers (sometimes crudely, over-insistently, and with a surfeit of misanthropic bombast) attacked throughout his career. It may be a measure of the spiritual void at the heart of our culture, and a confirmation of some of his direst insights, that he should by now have come to be almost entirely ignored.

A great deal was at one time made of what Jeffers himself called his "inhumanism", and earlier critics have spoken of his "disgust with the human species in toto" (Alfred Kazin), or of "the idée fixe which runs through all of Jeffers's volumes: Life is horrible" (Louis Untermeyer). He has been called a classical pessimist or a "classical Freudian" (R.P. Blackmur). Yet there is nothing in Jeffers's work of the business-like gloom of Hobbes or Freud, and his outcries against man's follies and pettinesses might be ...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image