By Erik Reece
Robinson Jeffers and the hope of human extinction
On a clear October day, I walked to the continent’s edge. I had arrived in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, encased in metal, first in a plane that brought me across the country, then in a rental car that transported me through Silicon Valley and its canyons of mirrored glass. Now I was bipedal again, and making my way along a narrow trail to a granite promontory called Point Lobos. I passed under a grove of ancient cedars, their twisted, wind-haunted limbs rising into an emerald canopy that seemed to float in the sky. A kingfisher darted through the understory as I emerged from the trees onto the jagged precipice of the point. Huge masses of conglomerate rock jutted out down below. Pelicans, cormorants, and gulls swirled around this harsh coast while the kelp-filled surf crashed against the shore, turning from gray to white to green as the water drifted into shallow tide pools.
In his poem “De Rerum Virtute,” the poet Robinson Jeffers described standing where I stood and watching these same rocks, “with foam flying at their flanks, and the long sea-lions / Couching on them.” He called the scene an “intrinsic glory” that “means the world is sound, / Whatever the sick microbe does.” What exactly is the “sick microbe”? It is us. And Jeffers didn’t stop there. In other poems, the human race is a “civil war on two legs,” a “walking farce,” a “denatured ape, this—citizen.”
To consider the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, one must go to a dark place, which is to say, one must look in the mirror. I’ve made passing glances at that glass for the past thirty years. On hiking trips, I have often kept a copy of Jeffers’s slim Selected Poems in my back pocket. I’ve loved what he has to say about hawks and rivers and mountains. But in the end, Jeffers’s darkness, his contempt for his own century and his own kind, always scared me off, sent me back to that more sanguine American poet, Walt Whitman. Since the election of Donald Trump, however, I’ve turned away from Whitman and have begun to take Jeffers’s grave warnings more seriously.
Whitman imagined setting off from Long Island, the “fish-shape Paumanok,” and striding across the country in the name of brotherly love, equality, and democracy. When the Democratic Review editor John L. O’Sullivan coined the term “manifest destiny” in 1845, he conceived of a huge blank canvas on which “the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government” would play out. The country was making progress, and promise lay in the West. For Whitman, the transcontinental railroad signified a spiritual advancement that would ultimately unify the West and the East. Peace in our time.
Jeffers didn’t quite see it that way. By the time he settled near Point Lobos at the beginning of the First World War, Jeffers had appointed himself the poet-prophet of the American West. He had come to Northern California’s ragged coast to turn his back on the country. He had come here to play Cassandra and warn his tribe of its dismal future, though “truly men hate the truth.”
I had come here to see whether he was right.
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