Chapter 4 - Human

Summary

The Tragedy of Humanism

In his poetry and letters, Jeffers both laments and appreciatively acknowledges the highly rigorous education he received under the direction of his father. As I noted in the Introduction, this intensive education began with Jeffers literally having Latin slapped into him by his father in early childhood and continued into his youth and teen years during which he attended a series of demanding European schools (where classes were taught in foreign languages that Jeffers had to learn on the fly). By the time Jeffers had completed his education, he had a solid command of Greek, Latin, French, and German and had read widely in classical literature. Despite the downsides of this demanding program (the most obvious being his abbreviated childhood [CL 2, 1018]), his thorough training in classical languages and literatures left Jeffers with a profound and lasting appreciation for classical Greek poetry and epic; and he regularly draws inspiration and plots for his own poetry from these ancient narrative wells. Greek tragedy plays an especially prominent role in his oeuvre, with plays from Euripides and Aeschylus providing the backbone for some of his longer narratives. Over the course of his career, Jeffers also composed several adaptations of ancient Greek tragedies. These reworkings are no mere translations or paraphrases on Jeffers's part, but are instead original retellings tailored to explore a theme central to his own poetry while also speaking to the perennial issues highlighted by the original text.

Although Jeffers's general relationship to ancient Greek poetry has been ably explored by scholars in both Jeffers studies and in classics, some of his reworkings of ancient Greek tragedies and themes have received less attention than others. One important piece by Jeffers that has received only minimal attention to date, “The Humanist's Tragedy,” and which was published in his collection Cawdor (1928), will form my focus in the initial portion of the present chapter. This narrative is a brief retelling of a few key episodes in Euripides's posthumously produced and historically influential tragedy Bacchae.

Euripides's original play opens with a monologue by Dionysus who explains that he is traveling to Thebes to announce his divinity, where his divine status has been flatly denied by King Pentheus and his mother Agave and Agave's sisters.