Robinson Jeffers Critical Essay | Critical Review by Nicholas Everett

Critical Review by Nicholas Everett

SOURCE: "The Inhumanist," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4782, November 25, 1994, pp. 10-11.

In this review of The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Everett finds Jeffers's doctrine of "inhumanism " incompatible with the demands of tragic narrative and suggests that the poet's lyric achievements will prove more enduring than his narratives.

Despite their commitment to transcendence, religious writers usually want to persuade us not only that there is an persuade us not only that there is an accessible higher plane of existence but that our lives within society will be all the richer for our efforts to reach it. Robinson Jeffers's religious vision was by contrast defiantly antisocial. Taking to its extreme the familiar mystical preference for the objects of awe over the objects of emotion, he saw nature as absolute reality and humanity as just one of its many ephemeral and negligible accretions. "It is easy to see...
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