In 1928, Robinson Jeffers received a questionnaire from a local newspaper that was preparing a special feature on him as Carmel, California’s most famous literary resident at the time. From the draft response that remains in his papers, it apparently inquired about his current projects, favorite themes, and daily routine, as well as the books, experiences, people, and ideas that influenced him. Under the heading of “ideas,” Jeffers wrote: “Mechanistic anti-spiritual point of view from medical school, running in harness with a mysticism that seems almost instinctive.”¹ The tension between materialism and mysticism, oppositional powers harnessed together to achieve a...

At a “Reinhabitation Conference” in 1976, Gary Snyder remarked: “The biological-ecological sciences have been laying out (implicitly) a spiritual dimension. We must find our way to seeing the mineral cycles, the water cycles, air cycles, nutrient cycles as sacramental.”¹ Poets deal in metaphors and paradoxes, the tensions between image and reality, mind and nature, word and thing. Snyder deftly handles a central paradox of environmental thinking—the idea that material facts contain essential values—making a case (implicitly) for the function of poetry in matters of ecological concern. Environmentalists are committed to preserving the material world, and popular ecology supplies...

In the first paragraph of “The Poet,” Ralph Waldo Emerson introduces one of the essay’s four master metaphors, fire:

There is no doctrine of forms in our philosophy. We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried about; but there is no accurate adjustment between the spirit and the organ, much less is the latter the germination of the former. So in regard to other forms, the intellectual men do not believe in any essential dependence of the material world on thought and volition…. We are not pans and barrows, nor even porters...

That the reception of “The Women at Point Sur” did not damage Robinson Jeffers’s reputation overall is indicated by the notice his 1932 collection,Thurso’s Landing and Other Poems, received from the popular media. After the book was published in March, an Edward Weston photograph of Jeffers appeared on the cover of the April 4 issue ofTimemagazine, and later that same month a picture of the poet and his sons, also by Weston, was printed inVanity Fair, which proclaimed: “In the eyes of many, Robinson Jeffers is America’s greatest poet.” TheTimearticle included photos of the...

In the relative calm of the “idyllic” years of the early and mid-1930s, Jeffers resolved the tensions of his struggle with the biology of consciousness into a philosophical holism. He expressed it succinctly in a 1934 letter: “I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and that they are all in communication with each other, influencing each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion)” (CL2:365). Although the drift of ecological and biological science in the twentieth century was toward increasing...

As we saw in chapter 3, Jeffers explores the “comic” potential for human integration in nature in other poems of the 1930s, and in chapter 4 we examined the crisis of holism brought on by the Second World War and resolved in “The Inhumanist.” In his later poems, Jeffers returns to the biology of consciousness and confronts many of the questions left unanswered in the 1920s. One of the most important advances is a more developed understanding of cells and their role in the evolution of consciousness. In late poems and fragments he revises his earlier opinion that consciousness is...

The introduction to this study outlined Robinson Jeffers’s reputation as it relates to modernist poetry and environmental history. As I pointed out there, Jeffers is often omitted from the literary history of American poetry even as he finds a prominent place in the evolution of environmental literature and ethics. The significance of Jeffers in both areas can be found in what Michael Davidson calls the “sacramental impulse” of West Coast poetry in the mid-twentieth century. Jeffers’s sacramental poetics is the Ur-expression of that impulse, yet, as I observed earlier, he finds no place as a precursor in Davidson’s account of...