 | GenghisTheHun (181)
12/14/2007 |  Robinson Jeffers once made the cover of Time Magazine but where is he now? Here is a great American poet who has been stuffed down the memory hole in good Orwellian fashion. What was his thought crime? Well he was anti-war and was against the entry of the US into World War II and World War I for that matter. The powers that be purged his works from anthologies and other collections.
His book The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948), a volume of poems that
was largely critical of U.S. policy, came with an extremely unconventional note
from Random House that the
views expressed by Jeffers were not those of the publishing company. Hilarious. So much for freedom of the press and freedom of speech in the publishing industry. Do something not politically correct, and you are toast!
Read the following from “So Many Blood-Lakes” written on May 12, 1944 during the closing hours of World War II:
We have now won two world-wars, neither of
which concerned us, we were slipped in.
We have leveled the powers
Of Europe, that were the powers of the world, into rubble
and dependence. We have won two wars and a
third is coming…
As for me: laugh at me. I agree with you. it is a foolish
business to see the future and screech at it.
One should watch and not speak. And patriotism has run
the world through so many blood-lakes: and we
always fall in.
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 | DrEntropy (40)
05/04/2006 | Robinson Jeffers was a very well-known poet in the 1920s, but his isolationism and pessimism about humanity destroyed his reputation in the later 30s and 40s. Jeffers spent most of his life, and wrote nearly all his poems, on the beautiful Big Sur coast of California. Together with fellow Northern Californian John Steinbeck (Sea of Cortez), RJ was greatly interested in ecology and the biological roots of human behavior, in an age when psychological thought was dominated by Behavioralism and Freudianism. Some of RJ's poetry is quite good (his best work is from the 1930s) though it is marred by what his friend and fellow poet Czeslaw Milosz called his 'inhumanism'; Reading Jeffers poetry, you do get the impression that he was the kind of person who loves nature, and even the elements, a lot more than he does human beings: "I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk."
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