Robinson Jeffers, An Uncanny Prophet
Nolte, William H.
William H. Nolte Robinson Jeffers, An Uncanny Prophet • • "There are times, like our own present and the Gracchan age, in which there are two most deadly kinds of idealism, the reactionary and...
...And don't pretend that the world Will be improved, or good will earned, or peace Made perfect by blasting cities and nations into bloody choppecs: if you believe that You'll believe anything...
...Every man has a wild beast in him...
...Hoult Gore, an 18-year-old boy who was killec in the Pacific, returns home to speak for all those who had bee sentenced to death by their governments...
...The Maskers, who stand outside such folly, partaking in it only to illustrate its nature (rather like the chorus in Greek tragedy), comment bitterly on the self-deceit of the tragic actors: First Masker...
...Austrian...
...If individual parts are ugly, the whole remains beautiful...
...One must indulge the wise in moments of mockery...
...I won't have it...
...And it attempts to place Hitler, who is called The Leader, in a historical—that is to say, causal—context that will enable the reader to understand him both as an object shaped by various factors and then as a subject, shaping, or more precisely destroying (at least temporarily), the nation he led for over a decade...
...Which is to say, he was a rallying point, a quieter of fears and dispenser of hope—in brief, a savior...
...Jeffers' Hitler has obviously succumbed to the romantic, idealistic, incestuous crime of all those who presume to encompass the hopes and aspirations of humanity in their single separate beings...
...In his rejection of all secular panaceas and his refusal to glorify the past or write hopefully of the future, Jeffers seems almost an anachronism in the modern world...
...Don't talk that mush...
...We're stronger than the whole rats' nest This side of Russia, those that fight and those that lie down, and you knew it, And it's now proved...
...In The Decline of the West Spengler described that process in great detail, stating his conclusion most succinctly in the following sentence: "Culture and Civilization—the living body of a soul and the mummy of it...
...Included in Be Angry at the Sun (1941), "The Bowl of Blood" will be incomprehensible to those who are so blinded by moral indignation that they can see Hitler and Nazism as nothing more than monstrous aberrations or mutations, as things never before realized in human history...
...Rache...
...In a passage that I fin particularly incisive, Hoult mockingly tells his American Legion naire father that he will give him twenty-four hours to find jus one reason for our going to war—and then, before his father ca answer, he rejects those reasons that are invariably given: "Don't say Pearl Harbor though...
...No historical evidence that I know of supports such a belief, whereas a great deal flatly contradicts it...
...but the man who invades another's land for patriotic reasons deserves our censure...
...Et vous qui m'appelez en aide: qu'est-ce que vous rites...
...Only blood, sir...
...New editions are appearing and then selling out almost at once...
...mos men let loose the bridle when not restrained by terror of the law...
...The opening lines of "Still the Mind Smiles" illustrate his historical view as well as any others: Still the mind smiles at its own rebellions, Knowing all the while that civilization and the other evils That make humanity ridiculous, remain Beautiful in the whole fabric, excesses that balance each other Like the paired wings of a flying bird...
...When Gilbert Highet wrote twenty years ago that the critical neglect of Jeffers constituted the greatest shame in American letters, he was expressing a view that I have heard numerous times in the last decade...
...From ruin to dominion...
...that is, he lives as do the lower animals in an eternal present, never looking backward nor seeing ahead, just jogging in place in a time-stuck world, falling into the same ditch into which his father fell, and his father before him, the Old Adam incarnate...
...Third...
...This is the breath of rottenness I smelt...
...we know they can help us with their counsel and their knowledge...
...Fear of the Devil and of hell fascinates their eyes and they detest the wise man who tries to enlighten them...
...The fact that people do demand a "partisan cry" rather than objective judgment goes a long way to explain why Jeffers has been misunderstood...
...Don't say freedom for foreigners, Unless you intend to kill Russia on top of Germany and Britain on Japan, and burn the whole world Into one bloody bubble-bath...
...Hitler can only answer that England hates his nation, but insists that he is not the cause of that hatred: Ha...
...If man must always have man in his eyes and nostrils Mass-suicide perhaps might be best...
...Moreover, he considered it folly to "defend civilization," since to do so was tantamount to defending decay...
...once the Rubicon has been crossed there is no room for the play of free choice in the tightly woven web of events...
...In the meantime, the Maskers, wearing skull masks and black tights with white bones painted on them, begin a dance of death, chanting names of the cities that will be destroyed throughout Europe and Russia...
...Indeed, he considered that process inevitable—and in no way worthy of lamentation...
...Jeffers depicted Hitler as being less the enemy of civilization than a product of its discontents...
...No man standing alone has ever been great...
...The human mind is weak...
...and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence...
...At one end of the cultural spectrum is barbarism and at the other is civilization...
...Second...
...Put bluntly, saviors are themselves sick and can only contaminate...
...Which is to say, again, he can be fashionable only to a certain point...
...His deep and abiding interest in values, which are born of violence, is revealed most clearly in his poems on the savior figures...
...His concentration on humanity reveals a poverty of imagination and wisdom...
...Oswald Spengler With rare exceptions, the most popular writers of any given period are quickly forgotten once their work is done—a fact that tempts one to conclude that there is an inherent wisdom in posterity...
...It is not aesthetic but it is necessary...
...In "Great Men," also from Be Angry at the Sun, Jeffers spoke of the greed inherent in those we consider great, and of the betrayal of great men by their future disciples...
...If he is made of the true stuff, he will invariably get a hearing from his age though he can never be so famous as the tripe-mongers...
...Though he believed that our decay was inevitable, that we had to become an Empire, he still maintained that the individual could avoid the mass corruption...
...From degradation and poverty to honor, wealth, power, Vengeance and victory...
...He also knows that there is now no turning back...
...All that is needed to justify the most heinous of war crimes is a few abstractions...
...For all his efforts to the contrary, Hitler can no more really believe in the soothsayer —that is, in history—than can any other such leader, but he is now desperate and hence willing to listen to "a solitude-crazed/ Fishwife for prophecies...
...The poem, like the others in that volume, contains a starkly objective historical sense...
...At which point the First Masker throws off his cloak and hood and appears in an old blue and red uniform: "I am Frederick the Great, who laid in sweat and blood the foundation stones of the German Reich...
...Only after conversing with the "mask" of a former friend named Friedenau, with whom he had served in the First World War, is he able to believe in final victory—and even then he must will the belief...
...They had duped us Deep into war, they'd fooled us into doing everything Except declare it and send armies abroad: but if we were blooded, We'd be mad enough...
...democracy is pure prose, abstract, indefinite, and, as they use it, dishonest...
...But he does not stop there...
...In "The Love and the Hate" (the first part of the long narrative), Jeffers attempted u refute the arguments of those who bear responsibility for ou...
...that is, it is nigh unimaginable that the dead would dis agree with his censures of the living...
...Without him there would be no Caesars, and without the Caesars there would be no history books to sadden and enlighten sober men...
...Frederick reminds The Leader that he had always been a friend to England and then demands, "What have you done to England...
...Vengeance...
...He tells The Leader that he "would have unified a 12 The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1971 Europe"—the recurring dream of all leaders, just as the idealist invariably dreams of Unity...
...The poverty, not the excess...
...Far from defending civilization as the summit of human achievement, or of attempting to prolong the civilized state in a world of flux, Jeffers believed, quite emphatically, that civilization's "ripening/ Is freedom's crisis...
...No show without it, sir: she inhales the vapor and drifts into her trance...
...Writing in Saturday Review (May 22, 1971), a journalist (decency forbids my giving his name) called Jeffers a "proto-fascist" who once described Hitler as a "genius," implying that any such description must necessarily connote approval...
...Blood, terror, treacheries in a just cause...
...Indee as early as 1934, in "Rearmament," he wrote of the "disastro rhythm" of events that would convey us to the fiery outrage...
...The opening lines reveal quite clearly his attitude: This morning Hitler spoke in Danzig, we heard his voice...
...Which is to say, patriotism is good or evil depending upon circumstance...
...That I don't like...
...To mirror the hopes of his people successfully, it was necessary that he possess a touch of genius and at the same time be insufficiently wise...
...William H. Nolte Robinson Jeffers, An Uncanny Prophet • • "There are times, like our own present and the Gracchan age, in which there are two most deadly kinds of idealism, the reactionary and the democratic...
...If asked why civilizations cause such mischief and grief in the world before and during their inevitable decline, Jeffers probably would have answered that, for one thing, the restraints imposed by civilization must finally find release—in mass wars, for example...
...Man is most monstrous when he attempts to become the Truth, when he believes that he is a word, a concept, a symbol...
...Whoever thinks this man is more wicked Than other men knows not himself...
...Nearly all the poems of that volume are filled with the painful knowledge of man's helplessness before the gathering forces of a second world war...
...The times, I am convinced, are now catching up with what was most "timeless" in his verse...
...The one believes in the reversibility of history, the other in a teleology of history...
...At a time when even the wise were admonishing the multitudes to gather into herds, Jeffers insisted that it was clearly time (I am referring to "The Soul's Desert," written on August 30, 1939) "To become disillusioned, each person to enter his own soul's desert/ And look for God—having seen man...
...Preeminently the advocate of disillusion, he remained steadfastly attached to the present while at the same time remaining detached from poetic fads and fashions...
...When one of the Maskers remarked that the "costly luxury" of freedom could be maintained only by staying "at home" and protecting what is real—that is, what we then possessed—he was stating the limits of patriotism: Men must keep in their minds The one way to be free: that's to be better armed And stronger than others, and not covet their goods, And stay frugally at home, death to invaders: the Greek stares flowered While this was theirs...
...wise men have pretended The summer insects enviable...
...and our generosity second,—we have always been generous...
...all seek escape from the naturalistic world of causal relations...
...Indeed, the constantly reiterated query about why Jeffers is not more read today makes me wonder if he's not the most widely read "unread" poet in world literature...
...The old woman, who gives counsel to those who ask it, is obviously the voice of history...
...It is only swine's blood...
...Most important to the discussion of Jeffers' still controversial views about the war and our part in it is the question of whether Hitler posed a threat to Civilization—of whether a German victory in Europe would have meant the death of all those qualities we attribute to civilization...
...With the hawkers of salvation so loud in the land today, Jeffers' analysis of the savior complex—or rather with one particular savior—has special immediacy...
...And he must, above all else, be deaf to the cries of the Many in order to hear the refrains that blow from out the past and into the future...
...A man of genius: that is, of amazing Ability, courage, devotion, cored on a sick child's soul, Heard clearly through the dog wrath, a sick child Wailing in Danzig...
...In his moment of doubt he compares himself to the greatest of Western saviors: This is my Gethsemane night, Christ's agony in the garden: only to great artists Come these dark hours...
...A Masker states the view (which was Tolstoy's in War and Peace) when he personifies Power as the fathering force: It [power] chooses one man at random And clouds him and clots around him and it possesses him...
...Once the height has been reached every road leads downward...
...As one Masker put it: "They say 'blood and soil,' while the West says 'democracy.' Did you ever hear a prosier word...
...wrote me in 1966: "Jeffers' books which a few years ago were found all over at fairly reasonable prices have suddenly disappeared and when available the prices have skyrocketed...
...Or perhaps I should say that The Leader's inversion (according to the Maskers) makes him simply all-too-human...
...If in "The Bowl of Blood" Jeffers expressed a deterministic view of the causes of the war, in The Double Axe, written during and just after the war when the survivors (at least in those na tions which were on the winning side) were celebrating their victory and, as is natural, forgetting the dead, he insisted tha we should never have become involved...
...No one would deny that the man who defends his land from foreign invaders is worthy of praise...
...Another reason for the almost instant oblivion that covers the straw-giants of yesteryear (and one that may be too obvious to need statement here) is that the audience that whoops and cheers for these pyrite magnificoes is an audience of semi-literates whose lips twitch and tremble as they read...
...don't say democracy...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1976 After the meetings with Frederick and Napoleon, Hitler is more than ever doubtful that he will succeed in his plan for European unification (a euphemism for conquest...
...Which is to say, he knows enough history to realize that he can only lose...
...No matter where one might place Hitler in comparison with humanity at large, it is important to realize that his shibboleths possess a power not to be found in the abstractions of prose...
...To begin with, those who expressed such a view had somehow convinced themselves that civilization and democracy were the same things, or were, in any case, complementary, even necessary one to the other...
...In other words, as the Second Masker remarked, the inordinate egotism of the savior makes him less than human rather than more...
...We should know, as he remarked in "The Answer," 13 a poem published in 1937, that "great civilizations have broken down into violence, and their tyrants come, many times before...
...It is also true, I think, of the poetry of Jeffers...
...The little mask (or masque) is, first of all, a splendid work of an—and hence neither more nor less moral than a violent storm (or picture of that storm) or a sunset (or a picture of that sunset...
...Most of us, I suspect, would insist that Hitler was "more wicked" than we are...
...For example: "The crackpot dreams of Jeanne d' Arc and Hitler, the murderous innocence of Attila, the bombast of Roosevelt, the tinsel star of Napoleon, the submissiveness/ Of peoples to leaders and men to death...
...Indeed, in a letter to Voltaire he expressed ,a thoroughly J effersian view: "Superstition, self-interest, vengeance, trea.4 son, ingratitude, will produce bloody and tragic scenes until the end of time, because we are governed by passions and very rarely by reason...
...Finally, all act out of a love for self which they misinterpret as love for mankind...
...but that would be to say, according to the premises of the Maskers, that he was more patriotic, more determined to raise up his people, more convinced that ends justify means, and, above all, more gifted in the art of manipulating people than we are...
...crimes...
...Unlike the scientist who takes things apart in order to discover them, the poet, Jeffers wrote, "puts things together, producing equally valid discovery, and actual creation...
...Not I but your own blood and successor, The old outcast at Doom burnt the roast...
...He was to the embittered Germans what Huey Long was to impoverished Louisianans, . and, in many ways, to be sure, what Roosevelt was to economically depressed Americans...
...The Aiternative An American Spectator May 1976...
...revanche...
...Jeffers would not deny that the war was inevitable...
...Listen: the man does not have power, Power has the man...
...Though Jeffers clearly approved of our democracy, he never believed that we should force our way of life on other nations...
...What he takes apart in "The Love and the Hate," he puts back together in "The Inhumanist" ; and human folly is but one of the parts...
...In "Wise Men in Their Bad Hours," first published in 1924, he remarked the peculiar envy which many intellectuals have for the sleep-walking masses...
...We learn that The Leader has put on a mask himself, one formerly worn by others...
...But sentimentality, never...
...They needled the touchy Japs and they did it for them...
...He clearly enunciated such a view in an address he gave at the Library of Congress and elsewhere in February and March of 1941...
...Democracy: the clay life-belt that sank Athens, and is sinking France...
...To begin with, in his person were embodied, symbolically as well as in fact, those frustrations, fears, and hatreds natural to a proud people who have been defeated...
...It is her method...
...Which is, as a matter of fact, precisely what he did—a romantic conclusion to his romantic dreams...
...Both, saviors and toxins fill us with awe, with fear and trembling, and not infrequently (to borrow again from Kierkegaard) with sickness unto 11 death...
...As a matter of fact, Jeffers called Hitler a genius in "The Day Is a Poem (September 19, 1939...
...After a sharp decline in popularity just before, during, and after World War II, Jeffers' stock has in recent years been on the rise again...
...During his lifetime (1887-1962) Jeffers was one of the two or three most famous poets writing in English...
...Out of the mother...
...In a previously unpublished poem which just appeared in Harper's (February 1976), entitled "What Odd Expedients," he commented on the "odd expedients" employed by God to create new values...
...Considering his rejection of all mass beliefs and faiths, his extraordinary individualism, and his abhorrence of all intrusions on his privacy, one might marvel that he gained so large an audience in the 1920s and 1930s, when he was featured on the cover of Time magazine and only T.S...
...Eliot was his competitor as our most popular serious poet...
...and perhaps it will be our destiny to carry the heritage of European culture, and what we have added to it, across a time of twilight to a new age...
...Not since Swift has anyone of the English-speaking world more effectively shown the horror of human folly...
...Though told by Friedenau to pay no attention to the "spirits," Hitler cannot shake the doubts that cling to his rational self...
...After disdainfully introducing himself— "Je suis le roi de Prusse...
...The mischief is that though some things never change, the merely fashionable changes from generation to generation, and often from decade to decade...
...In its abstract form, it is irrational...
...A little personality lost, and the wild...
...Except, most rarely, his will, passion or intellect Have come to posthumous power, and the naked spirit Picked up a crown...
...few can restrain it...
...Which is to say that he expresses only those aspects of his age which might be found long before and which will be with us long after his dance is done...
...Like Spengler and various other proponents of the cyclic theory of history, he considered civilization as a hardening of the arteries of culture...
...Refusing to subscribe to the comfortable lies on which moral indignation feeds, Jeffers viewed the sorry spectacle from a distance, from his tower...
...He has been every bit as solitary and secure in his own majority of one as were Poe, Melville, Whitman, Thoreau, and Dickinson in the nineteenth cenThe Alternative: An American Spectator May 1976 tury...
...As Colonel Weiss tells The Leader: "We know now that the dead live...
...All his saviors act against reason...
...and if we feel ourselves forced to intervene in foreign conflicts, we must consult the interests of our people first...
...Therefore we must guard what we have, for it is precious...
...as Byzantium carried the culture of Greece and Rome across the dark centuries, from that age to this one...
...Given the perspective from which his argument is sounded, it is difficult to refute Jef fern...
...And don't, for God's sake, Pretend that we had to fight while we still had friends In Europe: what do we want of Europe...
...In "Shine, Perishing Republic," written in the middle 1920s, Jeffers had described the movement from ripeness to decay, from Republic to Empire, in terms of natural process: I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth...
...Read aloud, the opening lines give off a somber music: Wise men in their bad hours have envied The little people making merry like grasshoppers In spots of sunlight, hardly thinking Backward but never forward, and if they somehow Take hold upon the future they do it Half asleep, with the tools of generation Foolishly reduplicating Folly in thirty-year periods...
...We can still afford the material risks of sentimentality, but not the disillusion that follows it...
...It makes no difference, to the inevitable failure with which both burden a nation over whose destiny they have power, whether it is to a memory or to a concept that they sacrifice it...
...entering the war...
...and ideology last...
...both at home and abroad...
...In patriotism, which is clearly a virtue up to a point, lie seeds enough for any nation to become imperialistic...
...The Leader...
...Though the Reverend Arthur Barclay in The Women at Point Sur (1927) and Jesus in Dear Judas (1929) are his most memorable portraits of the savior, there are other characters, fictional and nonfictional, who would fall under that heading—Clare Walker in The Loving Shepherdess and, most especially, Hitler in "The Bowl of Blood...
...Finally, the mass reader, like the benighted serf before Gutenberg, has no memory...
...If at times Jeffers did little more than scold man for his stupidity and blood-thirstiness, he also sought to make some kind of moral sense out of the violence that lies as much in the spinning atoms as in the heart of man...
...In their discussion of the sources of power, the Maskers remark that Hitler and those with him did "have a sense of the other world, the inhuman one...
...That, too, was a moral war...
...Nor don't say freedom: War's freedom's killer...
...In that poem, probably written early in the war, he wrote that "The next chapter of the world/ Concerns America and Russia, two bulls in one pasture...
...Indeed, all living things wear masks—that is, assume shapes—that can be put on or taken off...
...people want a partisan cry, not judgment...
...more than threci fourths of mankind are made for subjection to the most absurd fanaticism...
...Though his saviors differ vastly in personality—and hence in our estimation of their moral worth—each is monstrous in being so all-too-human...
...Patriotism ranks highest on that list of abstractions...
...In "The Bowl of Blood" Jeffers at once rejects the romantic theory that great men make history for the deterministic theory that forces make the man...
...While calling mankind (half in humor) "diese verdammte Rasse," Frederick laughed at utopias of benevolence and peace—just as did Jef, fers...
...And I died for that...
...And when one dies, as the Second Masker remarks, "it is only someone dropping a mask...
...Without ever breaking away from humanity, each exaggerates his humanity until he (or she) becomes superhuman or, if you will, subhuman...
...It is necessary from time to time To turn the eyes away from mankind, Frederick the Great's "verdammte Rasse," Or be choked with pity and laughter...
...In "The Bowl of Blood," written fifteen years later, when everyone in the West was intimately concerned with the approaching war, he considered ways of delaying the inevitable...
...they eat and laugh too, Groan against labors, wars and partings, Dance, talk, dress and undress...
...Misery and riches, civilization and squalid savagery, Mass war and the odor of unmanly peace: Tragic flourishes above and below the normal of life...
...it is ever the greedy Flame on a wick dipped in the fat of millions...
...Where am I leading the Germans, King...
...Germany wouldn't attack Although we sank her boats and supplied her enemies...
...The poem suffers, as you might expect, from that intensity of pity and hatred, but it is an unforgettable narrative that only a great poet could have written...
...4** Jeffers was fascinated with human saviors much as the pathologist is fascinated with bacterial toxins...
...Still, the Germans employed the concrete language of poetry, while the West used the abstractions of prose...
...Oh, Oh," he moaned, "God damn you, haven't you One single reason...
...There is greatness during the growth of a culture...
...His attitude towards Hitler is actually clear enough—and yet, as might be expected, a few critics believed they detected fascist sympathies in Jeffers, even down to the present...
...It is pitifully ironic that in this century we have fought one war to make the world safe for democracy, another to save civilization, and two others for ideological reasons...
...He can, however, allow those events to run their full course—and thereby bring down his nation's roof as memorial to his name...
...In the last ten years translations of his poetry have been very well received on the Continent, and especially in Iron Curtain countries where he is probably the favorite American poet...
...Jeffers wrote "The Love and the Hate" out of pity for the dead and utter disgust and contempt for warmongers the world over, and he was most contemptuous of the warmongers who happened to be ourselves...
...His out-of-print volumes are in great demand once more...
...The great writer, by contrast, expresses both his own age as well as all ages...
...The literary lions of whom I speak—those who are perennially on the best-seller lists and who wear silk underwear, keep a retinue of sycophants, and turn stockbrokers green with envy—win their laurels by packaging for mass consumption whatever is most fashionable during that season...
...Unfortunately, Hitler's sense of that world—the North Sea sunset, the Berchtesgaden landscape, the nature-dreams of Wagner and so forth—was too romantic to make it effective, that is, to make him abjure power over the lives of men...
...One bookfinder (with the House of Books, Ltd...
...he says here, in this most didactic of his poems, is that the re sons given were bad ones—no better than those which duped 14 The Alternative: An American Spectator May 197' into World War I. Needless to say, we have seen the same reasons touted in support of the ten-year conflict in Asia...
...all are blindly committed to one ideal...
...At the same time he realized, as one of the Maskers put it, that "The present is always a crisis...
...That was a trick, a dirty one...
...He perfectly illustrated the Caesar that Jeffers described in "Meditation on Saviors" in 1928: Who is born when the world wanes, when the brave soul of the world falls on decay in the flesh increasing Comes one with a great level mind, sufficient vision, sufficient blindness, and clemency for love...
...Although he praised our democracy for the freedom it allowed individual citizens and insisted that he would fight fascism in this country, as well as Nazism or Communism, Jeffers always believed that the only excuse for making war was self-defense...
...A great man must have a following, whether he gains it Like Roosevelt by grandiose good intentions, cajolery And public funds, or like Hitler by fanatic Patriotism, frank lies, genius and terror.Without great following no greatness...
...The first half of the poem: Consider greatness...
...Frederick contemptuously dismisses such nonsensical ideals: "Hm...
...He bungled them into hating us: mend it could no man...
...He is, after all, the true Upholder of the Faith (whatever that happens to be at any given time), and the muscle and sinew upon which all empires rest...
...The Second Masker removes his cloak and hood, which th First puts on, and enters wearing the mask and attitude o Napoleon...
...I consider it important that he did not use the word civilization in the following passage, but rather the word culture: "Europe will be physically and morally exhausted after this second world war...
...Accent the word ripening...
...Steinfurth...
...and, for another, the civilized state, in order to prolong its life-span, will always place a high premium on such abstractions as are necessary to give the social body an appear-ance (and it can only be an appearance) of both permanence and rectitude...
...One of the ways was to avoid the wars, especially moral wars, which are endemic to civilizations and hasten their declines...
...invoking destruction and wailing at it...
...While all his saviors are driven, in varying degrees, by a lust for power, it is also apparent that each is finally victimized by his or her attachment to an absolutist concept of Truth...
...he h written a year before our entry into it that we would have to fo low blindly our leaders who were intent on making war...
...The posturings, not the wickedness...
...And even as he insists he will not commit the madness of Napoleon, who embroiled himself in Russia before he had settled with the English," The Leader is disturbed by the worm of doubt that he, too, will fail in his noble mission, fail even "After all that hope and faith, the labor, the long preparation, the...
...and home to the mother...
...When the woman bends over a basinful of some dark liquid, Hitler demands to know what it is: Steinfurth...
...That is true of the world certainly...
...When it blurs the vision of the patriot and causes him to defend an idea of something rather than the thing itself, it debases what it ostensibly seeks to glorify...
...This damned human race...
...but once the summit has been reached—that is, when a civilization has been formed and it takes the fatal step towards imperialism—more and more restrictions of individual freedom become necessary to maintain an appearance of vigor and health...
...from the world waiting, stalled between storms, decaying a little, Bitterly afraid to be hurt, but knowing it cannot draw the savior Caesar but out of the blood-bath...
...The rhythmic flow of the opening lines, in particular, perfectly complement the central idea of the poem —to wit, that to have made "Something more equal to the centuries/ Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness...
...In defining him I intend no mockery...
...Blood and soil are poetry, you can fight for them...
...To concern himself with permanent things, he must know history, and he must have an eye for those traits in man which will endure...
...I suspect, incidentally, that Jeffers admired the great German, who was Hitler's opposite in most ways...
...The modern poet who best exemplifies these views (and who, incidentally, stated most of them) is, I believe, Robinson Jeffers...
...Beauty of the world resumed...
...We must resist the temptation, of course, since nothing could be more nonsensical than the melioristic view that men are growing brighter (or women more virtuous) than their grandsires (or granddams...
Vol. 9 • May 1976 • No. 8
