Pacific Headlands*

The U. S. Has Jeffers, a New Poet of Genius

A night the half-moon was like a dancing girl,

No, like a drunkard's last half dollar

Shoved on the polished bar of the eastern hill-range,

Young Cauldwell rode his pony along the sea-cliff;

When she stopped, spurred; when she trembled, drove

The teeth of the little jagged wheels so deep

They tasted blood; the mare with four slim hooves

On a foot of ground pivoted like a top,

Jumped from the crumble of sod, went down, caught, slipped;

Then, the quick frenzy finished, stiffening herself

Slid with her drunken rider down the ledges,

Shot from sheer rock and broke

Her life out on the rounded tidal boulders.

The night you know accepted with no show of emotion the little accident; grave Orion

Moved northwest from the naked shore, the moon moved to meridian, the slow pulse of the ocean

Beat, the slow tide came in across the slippery stones; it drowned the dead mare's muzzle and sluggishly

Felt for the rider. . . .

Big publishers, too, gave little show of emotion. It remained for a Manhattan linotyper--an imaginative man-- to publish Tamar and Other Poems at the author's expense.

The Poems. Narratives inform the body of Robinson Jeffers' verse. Tamar, of which the above are the opening lines, unrolls a tragedy of incest, Hebraic in origin (II Samuel xiii), Greek in treatment. Tamar Cauldwell, slender virgin in a rotting house, makes her brother her lover, takes another lover to shade the fruit of her sin. The ghost of old Caukler's incestuous sister--returning through the trances of a fat psychic aunt, Stella, and the gibbering of an idiot aunt, "poor Jinny" --torments Tamar, tells her a curse is in her blood, inescapable, unclean. Tamar, fearless and fire-souled, refines her sin, lays the ghost by seducing her father. All are consumed--sin, protagonists, accessories--when the idiot crone Jinny, childishly embracing her candle for a star, turns the old house into a holocaust.

The Coast-Range Christ is of David Carrow, whose innocence knew only love for Christ. David spurned James O'Farrell's wife, fled the War draft, hid in the hills, praying. O'Farrell's wife, Iscariotwise, led a manhunt in the dark. When David took his fierce old father's bullet in the breast, a blinding apocalypse came down upon the hills.

Fauna--amorous, honey-spun, Keat-sian--allegorizes a northerner's change of heart upon settling in ripe, sun-warmed California.

Point Joe, Natural Music, Point Pinos and Point Lobos, Continent's End and other pieces are religio-philosophical reflections upon the poet's habitat. There are dead men's songs, a War poem, two poems to the poet's house and several spans of pure nature worship.

The Poetry. Poet Jeffers is a simple man, himself more an instrument than a user of instruments. Comparable to Walt Whitman in spiritual stature, he sings, as did Whitman, rather by instinct than by a theory of prosody. Much prose, much "barbaric yawp" result; but the stories stretch taut, life quivers, poetry abounds.

Jeffers, who lives on a promontory at the mouth of the Carmel River, near Monterey, Calif., draws all his imagery from the world about him--cormorants, mustangs, seagulls, corposant hill-fires, barking seals, giant redwood trees, the good and evil winds of heaven, Indian spirit-gods moving by night, mystical wind-torn cypresses, condors, vultures, flowers and seaweeds, soaring California mountains, the illimitable bosom of the Pacific, the Pacific groundswell, ponderous granite boulders, vast shore plains, the unthinkable bottom boundary of the oceans. He hurls his images or bites them out; he rumbles, casts spells, croons, soothes, claps out thunder, flashes naked lightning, dreams serene or troubled beauty--and with his inmost eye, contemplates the closed, unchangeable cycles of life,

. . . the enormous rhythm of the stars' deaths

And fierce renewals. . . .

The Significance. Under and over the chatter of the busy nation, behind business-noise and play-noise, are heard the real voices of the continent-- Frost and Robinson in New England, Sandburg and Lindsay in the Midwest. The Far West has been silent since Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, John Muir. Now Jeffers is heard, unmistakably powerful, individual, a true racial poet chanting on his high Pacific headland.

Critics. Mark Van Doren, in The Nation: "The most rousing volume of verse I have seen in a long time. . . . Few are as rich with the beauty and strength which belongs to genius alone."

James Rorty, in The New York Herald-Tribune : ". . . Exhibits the maturity of a remarkable talent, which critical opinion will have to take account of and measure at leisure. . . . America has a new poet of genius."

The Poet. Born 38 years ago. "near Pittsburgh," John Robinson Jeffers had a wandering childhood in Europe; studied Arts, Medicine, Literature, Forestry successively at Occidental College (Los Angeles), University of Southern California, University of Zurich (Switzerland) and University of Washington. In 1916, he published Californians, narrative poems celebrative of the state he had adopted, but acclamation of this book, as of Tamar, was inaudible east of the Sierras. Mr. Jeffers has never contributed to magazines, "thinking that poetry is nothing if it is not individual." Near Monterey, on a stormy ocean cliff, he and his wife live in "a thick-walled house and tower of gray-granite sea-boulders," built mostly with his own hands.

*TAMAR AND OTHER POEMS--Robinson Jeffers--Petyr G. Boyle ($1.50),