This slim volume continues my March plan of reading California authors while in California, and perhaps more than any of the others, Jeffers (1887-1962) is a writer of this place.

Born to a minister and his wife in Pennsylvania, Jeffers received a classical education in Europe and graduated from Occidental College at 18. Moving on to USC and the University of Washington, he studied medicine, literature, and forestry before dropping out and marrying a fellow graduate student.  They moved to Carmel where they lived, built stone buildings, and wrote until they died.  Jeffers achieved fame on the cover of Time in 1932 and a Broadway play in 1946 before fading from view.  His poetry recently has re-emerged in the environmental movement influencing Robert Hass and Gary Snyder among others and being cited for its anti-war, anti-US imperialism as well.

I loved this book with its images of the Carmel shore, its rocks, pounding surf, rounded green/brown hills, hawks, and quiet.  He often contrasts the beauty and power of nature with man’s inevitable and harmful strivings pointing out that the America of latter 20th C is doomed to follow the course of the Greeks, Romans, and other civilizations that rose and then fell.  His epic poem ‘Roan Stallion’ about a Native American woman and her daughter living in a cabin in a ravine in Carmel with a violent, drunken man and his untamed roan horse was powerful and has stayed with me.

I was struck by his poems written shortly before and during WWII in which he decried man’s violence and America’s imperial aspirations.  Many of those poems could have been written today as America once again gears up for a war.  In his poem ‘Teheran’ he mourns the 1943 meeting of FDR, Stalin, and Churchill that will divide the world and result in the U.S./Russian conflict.  He writes “The future is clear enough/In the firelight of burning cities and pain-light of that long battle line,/That monstrous ulcer reaching from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, slowly rodent westward: there will be Russia/And America; two powers along in the word; two bulls in one pasture…..Observe also/How rapidly civilization coarsens and decays; its better qualities foresight, humaneness, disinterested/Respect for truth, die first; it worst will be last—-Oh, well: the future! When man stinks, turn to God.”

This poem is quite typical of what critics dubbed Jeffers ‘inhumanism’, the exaltation of nature and the natural world of animals, oceans, rocks while sadly commenting on the wars, destruction, and hatred that characterizes man.  The latter, Jeffers felt, will disappear eventually, while the natural world will continue on forever in its cyclical beauty.

I didn’t know Jeffers before reading this book,  but I do now and value his work. You should try this book and see if it has the same impact on you.