Conclusion: Inhumanism

Summary

In October of 1947, at the age of 60, Jeffers submitted to Random House the manuscript for his penultimate and perhaps most notorious book of poetry, The Double Axe and Other Poems. Written in the midst and aftermath of World War II, the manuscript contained scathing criticisms of US foreign policy and its involvement in the war; it also included harshly negative remarks about President Roosevelt's political judgment and physical paralysis. Saxe Commins, his longtime editor at Random House, was so taken aback by the manuscript's content that he requested from Jeffers substantial edits to several poems and removal of several others. Even after Jeffers had complied with most of these requests, Random House decided to append a Publisher's Note to the beginning of The Double Axe voicing their “disagreement over some of the political views pronounced by the poet in this volume” when it finally appeared in print in July of 1948.

Considerable scholarly attention has been focused on this dispute, with many of Jeffers's supporters viewing Random House's editorial interventions as a scandalous instance of suppressing free speech and artistic creativity. Jeffers himself, though, seems to have taken the matter largely in stride, complying with most of Commins's requests and offering mild pushback on others. Along with the retractions and revisions he made to the main body of the work, Jeffers also substantially revised his original Preface, making it considerably shorter and removing several important philosophical reflections. Fortunately, the original, unpublished Preface has been preserved and is readily accessible (CP 4, 418–21; SP 719–22). It includes a pellucid exposition of Jeffers's mature philosophy of inhumanism and also offers some of his clearest insights into how this way of thinking can address the challenges of finding meaning and beauty amid life's difficulties. In this concluding chapter, I want to examine both Prefaces in order to review some of the key themes of the previous chapters and to return to the issue of evil with which I began my reading of Jeffers.

In the shorter, published Preface to The Double Axe, Jeffers remarks that the book presents “a certain philosophical attitude” that he calls “Inhumanism” (CP 4, 428). This attitude, he tells us, is based on a shift in emphasis from “man to not-man,” a turning outward from the human world to the “transhuman” or more-than-human world.