Robinson Jeffers' Inhumanism: The Ecological Thought or The Misanthropic Rebuke?

I have been rereading poems by Pittsburgh born Robinson Jeffers (1887 – 1962) with my seminar class recently.  Jeffers has had a perennial appeal for environmentally-inclined readers, with his wilderness inflected meditations on his adopted home on the California coast.  The poems that I know (I am a Jeffers amateur) are sturdy rather than pretty, and charged with solid thought rather than airy abstractions.  Though there has been some discussion among the critics about his influences (was Schopenhauer as important to him as Nietzsche?) what strikes me are the thematic resonances with on the one hand American environmental writers both before and after him and, on the other, with themes from the Upanishads (which I am reading with another class).

The influence of the Upanishads, philosophical texts in the Hindu tradition, on Emerson and Thoreau is pretty well known.  The Upanishads were also famously a source for Schopenhauer (and Schopenhauer, of course, exerted a substantial influence on Nietzsche). Finally, these texts also influenced W B Yeats, whom Jeffers admired (see this post).  The Upanishads rest at the intersection therefore of many of Jeffers’ more important inspirations.  From this influence Jeffers can create striking things.  In The Answer (1935), for example, he writes:

“A severed hand/ is an ugly thing, and a man dissevered from the earth and the stars and his history…for contemplation or in fact… /Often appears atrociously ugly.  Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is/ Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.

The Isha Upanishad – or, Tale of Badger

by

Liam Heneghan

Bone on white rocks stays cool under an overcast sky.  When I picked up the skull I knew it was Badger’s because of the crest on the skull and because of the teeth.  This animal with large muscles hitched from jaw to skull can bite until it hears a bone break.  This is what I had been told and having no reason to disbelieve it I carried a stick with me when I walked alone.  If Badger bit, I would break the stick and he would let go.  Here was his skull now, strewn with many other bones on white boulders at the edge of the lake.  It was late afternoon and there was no smell but the smell of the sea, and the sea was miles away.

I progressed along the path and though I knew the evening was coming I walked out towards the mountains instead of turning for home as perhaps I should have.  For a while the lake was never far away, and neither were the trees but after a mile or so I came out from among the trees and walked along the mountain path.  On both sides of the path was bogland and I paused and looked over the vegetation and saw, not far away, a river flowing into the lake.  It had been raining so the river was full.  When I looked back I was facing Badger.  We both stopped on the path and we looked at one another; neither of us moved. For a long time we looked at each other.  I was afraid of Badger and Badger I could tell was fearful of me, so neither of us moved and neither of us looked away.  The sun was going down and the river was loud in the dusk.  Flanking Badger on the path I watched the breeze stir the plants and saw the tufts of bog cotton twitch like the heads of elderly minuet dancers spinning elliptically on a single spot.