Robinson Jeffers - The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers

TO UNA JEFFERS This book presents in one volume about half of my published work. In making the selection it was easy to eliminate the poems published in 1912 and 1916, which were only preparatory exercises, to say the best for them; and it was easy to omit a number of shorter poems from later volumes. After that the selection became more or less arbitrary. Several of the longer poems had to be omitted, for I have no desire to publish a collected works at this time, but there appears little reason to choose among them. The Women at Point Sur seems to mein spite of grave faultsthe most inclusive, and poetically the most intense, of any of my poems; it is omitted from this selection because it is the least understood and least liked, and because it is the longest. Such Counsels You Gave to Me is omitted in order to make room for a number of shorter pieces from the same volume. Such Counsels You Gave to Me is omitted in order to make room for a number of shorter pieces from the same volume.

The omission of Cawdor is purely arbitrary and accidental; I had finally to choose between this and Thursos Landing; and there was no ground for choice; I simply drew lots in my mind. The arrangement of the book is merely chronological; the long poems are presented in the order of their writing, the short ones in groups as they were first published. The earliest of the long poems was written, I think, in 1921 and 1922; the earliest of the short ones in 1917. This is The Songs of the Dead Men to the Three Dancers choruses from a wartime playreprinted here only as a sample of the metrical experiments that occupied my mind for a while. A good friend of mine, who is also my publisher, wants me to turn this foreword to some account; he says that a number of people have written pro and con about my verses, and it is high time for the author himself to say something. Very likely.

But I do not wish to commend or defend them, though sufficiently attacked; and it seems to me that their meaning is not obscure. Perhaps a few notes about their origins may be of interest to anyone who is interested in the verses themselves. Long ago, before anything included here was written, it became evident to me that poetryif it was to survive at allmust reclaim some of the power and reality that it was so hastily surrendering to prose. The modern French poetry of that time, and the most modern of the English poetry, seemed to me thoroughly defeatist, as if poetry were in terror of prose, and desperately trying to save its soul from the victor by giving up its body. It was becoming slight and fantastic, abstract, unreal, eccentric; and was not even saving its soul, for these are generally anti-poetic qualities. It must reclaim substance and sense, and physical and psychological reality.

This feeling has been basic in my mind since then. It led me to write narrative poetry, and to draw subjects from contemporary life; to present aspects of life that modern poetry had generally avoided; and to attempt the expression of philosophic and scientific ideas in verse. It was not in my mind to open new fields for poetry, but only to reclaim old freedom. Still it was obvious that poetry and prose are different things; their provinces overlap, but must not be confused. Prose, of course, is free of all fields; it seemed to me, reading poetry and trying to write it, that poetry is bound to concern itself chiefly with permanent things and the permanent aspects of life. That was perhaps the great distinction between them, as regards subject and material.

Prose can discuss matters of the moment; poetry must deal with things that a reader two thousand years away could understand and be moved by. This excludes much of the circumstance of modern life, especially in the cities. Fashions, forms of machinery, the more complex social, financial, political adjustments, and so forth, are all ephemeral, exceptional; they exist but will never exist again. Poetry must concern itself with (relatively) permanent things. These have poetic value; the ephemeral has only news value. Another formative principle came to me from a phrase of Nietzsches: The poets? The poets lie too much.

I was nineteen when the phrase stuck in my mind; a dozen years passed before it worked effectively, and I decided not to tell lies in verse. Not to feign any emotion that I did not feel; not to pretend to believe in optimism or pessimism, or unreversible progress; not to say anything because it was popular, or generally accepted, or fashionable in intellectual circles, unless I myself believed it; and not to believe easily. These negatives limit the field; I am not recommending them but for my own occasions. Here are the principles that conditioned the verse in this book before it was written; but it would not have been written at all except for certain accidents that changed and directed my life. (Some kind of verse I should have written, of course, but not this kind.) The first of these accidents was my meeting with the woman to whom this book is dedicated, and her influence, constant since that time. My nature is cold and undiscriminating; she excited and focused it, gave it eyes and nerves and sympathies.

She never saw any of my poems until they were finished and typed, yet by her presence and conversation she has co-authored every one of them. Sometimes I think there must be some value in them, if only for that reason. She is more like a woman in a Scotch ballad, passionate, untamed and rather heroicor like a falconthan like any ordinary person. A second piece of pure accident brought us to the Monterey coast mountains, where for the first time in my life I could see people livingamid magnificent unspoiled seeneryessentially as they did in the Idyls or the Sagas, or in Homers Ithaca. Here was life purged of its ephemeral accretions. Men were riding after cattle, or plowing the headland, hovered by white sea-gulls, as they have done for thousands of years, and will for thousands of years to come.

Here was contemporary life that was also permanent life; and not shut from the modern world but conscious of it and related to it; capable of expressing its spirit, but unencumbered by the mass of poetically irrelevant details and complexities that make a civilization. By this time I was nearing thirty, and still a whole series of accidents was required to stir my lazy energies to the point of writing verse that seemed to bewhether good or badat least my own voice. So much for the book as a whole: a few notes may be added as to the origins of particular poems. Tamar grew up from the biblical story, mixed with a reminiscence of Shelleys Cenci, and from the strange, introverted and storm-twisted beauty of Point Lobos. Roan Stallion originated from an abandoned cabin that we discovered in a roadless hollow of the hills. When later we asked about its history no one was able to tell us anything except that the place had been abandoned ever since its owner was killed by a stallion.

This is the only one of my poems of which I can remember clearly the moment of conception. I had just finished The Tower Beyond Tragedy and was looking about for another subjectwhich was to be contemporary, because I repented of using a Greek story when there were so many new ones at hand. I was quarrying granite under the sea-cliff to build our house with, and slacking on the job sat down on a wet rock to look at the sunset and think about my next poem. The stallion and the desolate cabin came to mind; then immediately, for persons of the drama, came the Indian woman and her white husband, real persons whom I had often seen driving through our village in a ramshackle buggy. The episode of the woman swimming her horse through a storm-swollen ford at night came also; it was part of her actual history....