Introduction: Between Poetry and Philosophy

Summary

This is a book about what the poet Robinson Jeffers would have described as “rock-solid themes” (CP 3, 35; SP, 567). It is about who we are and how we fit into the big scheme of things. It is about living and dying well in an era of cultural decline and ecological degradation. It is about dealing with the difficulties of existence and determining which things should be of paramount value and importance in our lives. Both Jeffers's poetry and his life as a whole were centered around these rock-solid themes—issues and questions that are as ancient as our oldest extant literature yet as fresh and as pressing for us today as they have been for any previous age.

If, as Charles Baudelaire suggests, modernity is marked by a turn toward “the ephemeral, the fugitive, and the contingent,” then the themes that form the focus of this book and Jeffers's poetic reflections on them must be understood as being distinctively and resolutely nonmodern in nature. Jeffers sought to admit into his poetry only material that spoke to (relatively) permanent realities (CP 4, 391; SP, 714), matters that would be of importance to people who might happen to read them one hundred and even a thousand years hence (CP 4, 422–27; SP, 723–28). It is perhaps this focus on perennial matters that has made his work (which entered its mature phase nearly a full century ago now) newly relevant for those of us who live in the so-called Anthropocene, an age in which planetary conditions have forced us to reckon anew with intellectual and existential battles we might have once thought we had been spared.

Although Jeffers engaged in a wide variety of pursuits and practices throughout his life, he was, perhaps above all else, a poet. Besides the prose contained in his letters, prefaces to various volumes, and occasional essays, his published writing is made up almost exclusively of poetic verse. His poems took several forms, from tightly written lyrics to full-length tragic dramas to sprawling, epic-style narratives that run well over one-hundred pages in length.