Lecture to Professor James L. Wortham's Class in Narrative Poetry given on May 22, 1949
by Lawrence Clark Powell
Librarian of the University of California at Los Angeles (retired)
[Lawrence Clark Powell is the author of the critical biography, Robinson
Jeffers: The Man & His Work, published by The Primavera Press, Los Angeles,
1934. Larry Powell is widely acknowledged as the "Dean Emeritus of Jeffers
Studies." It is with his kind permission that this lecture is made available
on the Tor House Foundation web page.]
IT seems to me that things are looking up for poetry in the University of
California, when a janitor in the University Press is awarded a Guggenheim
fellowship in poetry, when the gardeners' staff has recently included a
poet, and when the head librarian is invited to lecture on poetry. In all my
dozen years at U.C.L.A. this is the first chance I have had to talk about my
favorite subject, and to an audience which I am sure will not rush for the
doors, when I confess that I prefer poetry to prose and that I rank poetry
and music as man's most glorious achievements.
And yet I am not a crusader for poetry. One either likes it or he doesn't.
One is born, not made, to love poetry. Let me read what our subject today,
Robinson Jeffers, has written about this matter:
"I write verse myself," be said, "but I have no sympathy with the notion
that world owes a duty to poetry, or any other art. Poetry is not a
civilizer, rather the reverse for great poetry appeals to the most primitive
instincts. It is not necessarily a moralizer; it does not necessarily
improve one's character; it does not even teach good manners. It is a
beautiful work of nature, like an eagle or a high sunrise. You owe it no
duty. If you like it, listen to it, if not, let it alone."
I have never underestimated the power of poetry, even in this age of
science. It can change lives. I know. It changed mine. Twenty years ago I
was in a classroom somewhat smaller than this -- I went to college, not to
university -- taking a course on the Theory of Poetry, which began of course
with Aristotle. "There is a poet named Jeffers here in California," the
professor said, "who has been enormously influenced by the Greek tragic
poets. Have any of you ever heard of him?"
Up went my hand.
"What do you know about Jeffers?" the professor demanded scornfully.
"He's the guy who wrote a poem about a woman who fell in love with a horse,"
I said.
The class guffawed.
"Mr. Powell will see me after class," the professor said, and we returned to
Aristotle.
I stayed after class and received a dressing down for my freshness. I was
also ordered to prepare a report on Jeffers and his Greek influences, on
pain of flunking the course.
Thus began a study of Robinson Jeffers, which after more than twenty years
still goes on. Although I have written a book about him, my lecture today is
based on Jeffers' books, not on mine. In preparation for this class meeting
I re-read his twenty volumes of verse and in doing so, reassured myself that
he is a great poet -- a very great poet -- an American poet who although he
has been ignored by the Pulitzer Prize jury, will eventually, I predict, be
awarded the Nobel Prize for literature; for like many of our great literary
Americans, from Poe to Faulkner, Jeffers' reputation is greater abroad than
it is at home.
The re-reading of Jeffers was easier now, in a material way, than it was
twenty years ago, for I have arrived at a comparatively affluent state
wherein I am able to own all of Jeffers' books, including his rare first
three volumes, which back in my impecunious student days I had to type out
from borrowed copies -- a task which took me more time than I care to
remember, but which had the virtue of compelling me to read and write every
line he had published between 1912 and 1924.
Why do I think Jeffers is a great poet? First of all, "think" is the wrong
word. My conviction lies deeper than thought; it is rooted in my instinctive
feelings. To illuminate what I mean, let me quote Robert Frost on the
subject:
"It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to
wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the
moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound -- that he will
never get over it. That is to say, permanence in poetry as in love is
perceived instantly. It hasn't to await the test of time. The proof of a
poem is not that we have never forgotten it, but that we know at sight we
never could forget it."
My first and strongest conviction about Jeffers' greatness is deep and
instinctive, yet on examining my intellectual response to his poetry, I find
that my feelings and my beliefs are not in conflict. The more I think about
and analyze my primary response to Jeffers' verse, the more I am convinced
that it is a sound and lasting one, and that I have not been "sold down the
river" by emotional reactions to the admittedly sensational elements in
Jeffers' poetry.
For he has his faults -- which are well known to him -- and he has reviewed
them candidly in several of his short poems, and answered them, as in the
poem called "Self Criticism in February":
The bay is not blue but somber yellow
With wrack from the battered valley, it is speckled with violent foam-heads
And tiger-striped with long lovely storm-shadows.
You love this better than the other mask; better eyes than yours
Would feel the equal beauty in the blue.
It is certain you have loved the beauty of storm disproportionately.
But the present time is not pastoral, but founded
On violence, pointed for more massive violence: perhaps it is not
Perversity but need that perceives the storm-beauty.
Well. bite on this: your poems are too full of ghosts and demons,
And people like phantoms -- how often life's are --
And passion so strained that the clay mouths go praying for destruction.
Alas, it is not unusual in life;
To every soul at some time. But why insist on it? And now
For the worst fault: you have never mistaken
Demon nor passion nor idealism for the real God.
Then what is most disliked in those verses
Remains most true. Unfortunately. If only you could sing
That God is love, or perhaps that social
Justice will soon prevail. I can tell lies in prose.
Here then is one element of Jeffers' greatness: honesty. He is painfully
honest in recording what his wide (and also microscopic) vision sees. But
honesty is not enough to make a poet great. There must be a great deal more.
Mastery of our language, for example. Abundance of production. Solid
substance, profound thought, exalted music; and most of all, a certain
magnitude of being, which we call Homeric, Shakespearean, Dantean, or
Whitmanesque.
I want to inquire next into the principles which underlie Jeffers' theory
and practice of narrative poetry, to ask what he has sought to do and how
well he has succeeded; and by such an inquiry to pass in review the elements
of greatness which I find to be present in his mature and best work.
Now that Jeffers is sixty-two years old and has published a score of books,
we can look back on his life and his work, and see in them a slow, steady,
organic, and inevitable growth and development. I do not intend to dwell on
his personal life, nor seek to unravel the twisted threads of fact and
legend. It must be noted however that John Robinson Jeffers (as he was
christened), born in Pittsburgh of an intellectual mother and a religious
father, the head of a theological seminary, was precocious and outstanding
from childhood. He graduated from college at Occidental (my own alma mater)
at eighteen, was a brilliant graduate student at U.S.C. and Washington, in
medicine and forestry; excelled in wrestling, track, mountaineering, and was
also a good Bohemian. And he was marked by the demon from birth: he was a
poet. Not a very good one at first, it is true, as we can see by turning
back to the juvenilia which he contributed to such proper periodicals as the
Youth's Home Companion. But he did practice and master the conventional
verse forms and did not babble in so-called free verse. He was a craftsman
from the first.
I have no doubt that Jeffers could have achieved success either as a
minister, a doctor, a forester, or even as an athletic coach. His father,
the eminent divine, wanted his son to be either a minister or a doctor; his
only other child, Robin's younger brother Hamilton, became a distinguished
astronomer in the University of California -- and by coincidence works on
Mount Hamilton.
But Robinson Jeffers had another idea which increasingly dominated him. He
wanted to be a poet. He found himself unable to accept the theology of which
his father was a professor, and this caused conflict between filial duty and
poetic demon, which nearly wrecked Jeffers before it was resolved, by two
things: his meeting with a woman -- a fellow student at U.S.C. -- who was
both beautiful and intelligent enough to charm and to educate him, and of
such determined character as to curb his self-destructive bohemianism and
harness his energies in productive work. In the foreword to his Selected
Poetry, written years later, he paid her this tribute: "She never saw any of
my poems until they were finished and typed, yet by her presence and
conversation she has co-authored every one of them. Sometimes I think there
must be some value in them, if only for that reasons. She is more like a
woman in a Scotch ballad, passionate, untamed and rather heroic, than like
any ordinary person."
The other factor in stabilizing Jeffers was an economic one. He received a
legacy from a grandparent which, though not large, was enough to enable him
and his wife to live in the country and concentrate on poetry. He might have
become a dilettante, a playboy, a country gentleman-versifier; he became
none of these. He became a true and a great poet.
The country where they settled was Camel, here in California, years before
the tourists took it over; and familiar is the now legendary story of how
Jeffers built a granite house and tower with his own hands, planted two
thousand trees, "shunned the animal, man," and spoke only to hawks and
herons. I have not time to debunk this legend and will say only that as I
have come to know him personally I have found Jeffers one of the 'kindest,
gentlest, most friendly persons I have ever known. True, he is not
gregarious, but neither is he a recluse. He is, rather, a man like Yeats,
dedicated to poetry; only the most unremitting hard work could have produced
the disciplined body of work he has written.
I have mentioned a steady poetic development as being an element of Jeffers'
greatness. It is almost incredible, when you come to study it, the growth he
showed in his first three books. His first volume, Flagons and Apples, was
published at his own expense here in Los Angeles, thirty-seven years ago.
This little book, now rare and valuable, is a collection of subjective love
lyrics in conventional form. Four years later, after he had lived in Carmel
only two years, his second book, Californians, was published in New York by
the country's then leading publisher, the Macmillan Company. It was mainly a
collection of objective narrative poems of the Camel region and of southern
California, written again in conventional forms, and strongly influenced in
form and philosophy by Milton, Wordsworth and Shelley.
Eight years elapsed before Jeffers' third book appeared; eight years in
which he came to manhood, fathered twin sons, lost father and mother, and
saw the world bathed in the blood of the first World War. This blood bath
washed away every bit of the idealism and world-hope which Jeffers had
joyfully inherited from the English romantic poets; and in spite of Mr.
Horace Gregory, who in his History of American Poetry dismisses my
contention, I believe that no other influence has so powerfully molded
Jeffers' philosophy and his poetry, as have the two World Wars of our time.
And their influence has been evil and destructive, for they have tortured
his muse into hysteria, warped his verse into ugly excesses, and destroyed
the serene detachment which he achieved twice and which is essential for the
highest creative effort.
This third book, published again at his own expense at New York in 1924, is
called Tamar and Other Poems; and after the reviewers' enthusiastic
responses it was reprinted the next year, with certain additional poems, as
Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems. It is here that your assignment
started, with the narrative poems "Tamar" and "Roan Stallion," and the
semi-dramatic adaptation of Aeschylus caged in "The Tower Beyond Tragedy."
Between these three poems and the other long narrative of your assignment,
"Give Your Heart to the Hawks" which was published in 1933, lies that
period, free from war, wherein Jeffers reached his zenith.
His poetry from 1933: through the years of mounting international tension
and those of the most horrible of all wars, becomes progressively distorted
by his suffering; for Robinson Jeffers is a poet, a man of passionate
awareness, sensitivity and sympathy, on whose nerves the world's violence
has played a jangled and hysterical music. Witness his last narrative poem.
"The Double Axe," published last year, which is and anguished outcry against
war, but is neither good narrative nor good poetry. Except for a few short
poems, the only hopeful (and I believe lasting) thing about Jeffers' work in
the past fifteen years, is his adaptation of Euripides' Media which Judith
Anderson triumphed, and the royalties from which saved Jeffers and his
family from the hard times, which inflation has meant to those living on
small, fixed incomes.
This brings us to where I propose to examine in some detail the narrative
poems you have read, to determine Jeffers' purpose in writing them and to
judge how well he has realized his purpose.
Jeffers' primary purpose in writing narrative poetry is to tell a story. The
first and all-important test of any narrative poem is whether or not it is a
readable story. Jeffers passes this test. He is a good story-teller and in
his best work -- "Give Your Heart to the Hawks," for example -- he displays
a mastery of the elements of narrative poetry.
What are these elements? Plot, first of all, and recognizable human
characters. Action, description, setting. Language that is more vivid,
concentrated, and thrilling than prose. Take the opening lines of the four
poems we are considering today. Almost uniformly they, answer the questions
who, where, when, what, and serve to launch the reader into a story which he
cannot put down until the bitter end.
Jeffers' narratives are marked by action, violent action, by terrible
happenings such as one reads about in the newspapers -- murder, incest,
adultery, shootings, hangings, knifings, burnings -- all concentrated and
compressed into a few lines of poetry, and with such appalling effect that
one who turns to Jeffers merely to be amused gets the shock of his life.
Jeffers has repeatedly defended his choice of violent themes, and on several
grounds. First, there are classical precedents for stories of violence and
horror, going back to the Greeks and Elizabethans. Second, violence and
horror are hallmarks of this modern age. And third, there can be no
interesting or lasting stories of happiness alone. Happiness very quickly
turns into monotony. Death and disaster are exciting. "People love
disaster," Jeffers says, "If it does not touch them too nearly -- as we run
to see a burning house or a motor crash, a suicide or a street murder."
Jeffers' narratives are readable because he knows how to begin a story,
complicate it, develop it, and finally; how to end it, with every last body
accounted for. In spite of what he may do to his characters, he never leaves
the reader hanging. And yet this exciting entertainment is not his whole
purpose. It may be primary, but it is not total. His other great and earnest
purpose is his spinning these poetical yarns -- fables, he calls them --
moral. There is a quinine center in every one of his sweet story pills. This
moral purpose permeates his work, appearing in the narratives in the form of
apostrophes addressed to the characters or to the reader, and in many of his
short poems.
His moral purpose is also set forth in his occasional prose -- letters,
prefaces, reviews and so forth -- and I want to read one such example:
"Besides one's duty to tell the truth and one's duty to shame the devil",
Jeffers explains, "it seems to me there is a third moral principle for
story-tellers. The story that heaps emotions or complexities and makes no
thoroughfare is a weakening story and so I should think an immoral story;
but the story that through whatever passes attains significant release will
influence its reader in the same sense, and this is good for him, it is
moral. It is a happy ending, for something happens, whether marriage or
escape or sudden death, a lysis, a freeing of some sort; and a settlement,
an adjusted balance."
It might be Aristotle writing, for here is a restatement of the classic
Greek katharsis or purging of the reader's emotions through witnessing or
reading the serenely terrible denouements of "Oedipus Rex" or "King Lear" or
"Give Your Heart to the Hawks."
Of the four poems we are considering today, "Give Your Heart to the Hawks"
is, in my opinion, by far the best. What is wrong with the others? "The
Tower Beyond Tragedy" is a hybrid, neither Aeschylus nor Jeffers; neither
drama nor narrative poem, but a little of each, in unequal and unfused
amounts. Beautiful and moving as they are as isolated passages of poetry,
the prophecies of Cassandra and the peroration of Orestes, they are pure
Jefferese, serving as vehicles to carry his own personal philosophy of
extroversion. The poem is too long and there is too much talk which comes
from Jeffers, rather than from the characters.
Compare the "Tower" with the "Medea," which Jeffers wrote twenty years
later. "The Tower" is topheavy with irrelevant rhetoric and pace-slackening
descriptions. It is in every way excessive, that is to say, un-Greek. The
"Medea," on the other hand, is constructed with a firm, unerring hand. Its
actions are violent; its language restrained. Euripides and Jeffers are one.
As against the high-flown rhapsodies of Cassandra and Orestes, take
Euripides' choral ode to the city of Athens, one of the most famous in all
Greek poetry. Instead of using it as a vehicle to express his own well-known
loathing of cities and city life, Jeffers writes this wonderful paraphrase
of the original:
O God, protector of exiles, Lord of the holy sky, lead us
To the high rock that Athena loves, and the olive
Garland of Athens.
Athens is beautiful
As a lamp on a rock.
The temples are marble-shafted; light shines and lingers there,
Honey-color among the carved stones
And silver-color on the leaves of the olives.
The maidens are crowned with violets; Athens and Corinth
Are the two crowns of time.
Mycenae for spears and armor; Sparta
For the stern men and tall blonde women; and Thebes I remember,
Old Thebes and the seven gates in the gray walls --
But rather I praise Athena, the ivory, the golden,
The gray-eyed Virgin, her city.
And also I praise Corinth of the beautiful fountains,
On the fair plain between two gulfs.
God-favored cities of the Greek world.
Fortunate those that dwell in them, happy that behold them.
What is wrong with "Tamar?" It seems to me that the characters are unequal
to the emotions ascribed to them by Jeffers; they, are too frail and unreal
to carry the violent loads he lays upon them. It was not the first time
Jeffers had used incest as theme. Eight years earlier in the Californians
volume, he drew upon Shelley's poem of incest, "Rosalind and Helen," just as
he used the Biblical story of incest in "Tamar." "Tamar" is a violent revolt
against the poet's past influences; no more rhymed verse. no more hopeful
apostrophes to man's nobility. The war had wrecked the dream of human
brotherhood, learned from Shelley, Jeffers used "Tamar" as a means to purge
his own, rather than his readers' emotions. As puppets he regards his
characters on this poem, and puppets they are. Recall his invocation, which
opens section five of Tamar."
O swiftness of the swallow and strength
Of the stone shore, brave beauty of falcons,
Beauty of the blue heron that flies
Opposite the color of evening
From the Carmel River's reed-grown mouth
To her nest in the deep wood of the deer
Cliffs of peninsular granite engirdle.
O beauty of the fountains of the sun
I pray you enter a little chamber,
I have given you bodies, I have made you puppets,
I have made idols for God to enter
And tiny cells to hold your honey,
I have given you a dotard and an idiot,
An old woman puffed with vanity, youth but botched with incest,
You that make signs of sins and choose the lame for angels,
Enter and possess. Being light you have chosen the dark lamps,
A hawk the sluggish bodies; therefore God you chose
Me; and therefore I have made you idols like these idols
To enter and possess.
What about "Roan Stallion," that poem which was my own sensational
introduction to Jeffers, the story of a woman who fell in love with a
stallion? It sounds shocking, doesn't it? Actually it is more intellectual
than sensual. Although written in a rather turgid style of long staccato
lines and prosy passages, "Roan Stallion" is nevertheless one of Jeffers'
most characteristic narrative poems. Unlike "Tamar," whose characters the
poet despises, "Roan Stallion" contains a sympathetic portrayal of the woman
called California. And of course the horse is one of Jeffers' favorite
characters -- moving like a lion along the timbers of the fence, the dark
arched neck shaking the nightfall of the great mane . . .," his hooves
making "muffled thunder in the soft soil."
"Roan Stallion" is characteristic of Jeffers in that it contains most of his
favorite poetical ingredients; people both noble and debased, a noble
animal, a storm, and an excursion to the high hills from where the poet can
take off on one of his typical prophetic flights. All of these ingredients
are rather well integrated into the narrative, even the visionary flight
which grows naturally out of the woman's dream, as she sleeps at the
stallion's feet on the moonlit summit.
The poem even contains passages of Jeffers' atomic-astronomical language,
which he probably learned from his brother Hamilton, the astronomer. I once
collaborated on a translation of some of Jeffers' poetry into French. We
left these lines in English:
The atoms bounds-breaking,
Nucleus to sun, electrons to planets, with recognition
Not praying, self-equaling, the whole to the whole, the microcosm
Not entering nor accepting entrance, more equally, more
incredibly conjugate
With the other extreme and greatness, passionately perceptive of
identity. . . .
Such obscurity is rare in Jeffers. There are passages of deep thought which
require careful reading, his language is sometimes elliptical, but mostly he
is straightforward and eminently translatable.
This brings us to "Give Your Heart to the Hawks," the narrative poem which I
rank with Jeffers' "Cawdor" and "Thurso's Landing" as most perfectly
incorporating the elements of great and lasting poetry. The plot is not
distorted by excesses and abnormalities, the characters are real and
recognizable and respected by their creator for what they are; their actions
are well postulated, convincing and inevitable; the language is suited to
the action, the setting is vivid and magnificent; and the poet remains in
the wings, leaving the stage to the protagonists.
"Give Your Heart to the Hawks" is a story of adultery, murder, and remorse,
ending in madness and suicide. Those who teach Sunday School had better not
take it as a text. A strong man, even as Samson, is brought low by his own
passions and a woman's desire, and is finally destroyed by his own
conscience. It is a commentary on man's inability to escape the penalties of
sin, an example of self-punishment, of self-torture, of self-destruction.
When Oedipus learned of his crime, he blinded himself, just as did Jeffers'
earlier character, Cawdor, when he learned that he had murdered his innocent
son. In "Give Your Heart to the Hawks" when Lance Fraser learns of Mary
Abbey's suicide, he drags his hands along the barbed wire and lays them open
to the bone.
Pain and suffering are rarely absent in Jeffers, any more than they are in
human existence. The rock-stretched Prometheus and the Jesus nailed to the
cross live always in Jeffers' mind. Cruelty and pain are the things he hates
most, whether of man to man, man to animal or God to man and animal. "Give
Your Heart to the Hawks" shines with such cruelties as lobsters in boiling
water, "lives unable to scream"; a deer caught on a barbed wire fence it was
trying to jump, "a stinking monument to a loving God"; a broken-winged hawk
tethered and left to die of thirst and hunger. It is these conscious and
unconscious cruelties which prevent Jeffers from believing in a loving God,
in the traditional God-the-Father, in the service of which his own father
devoted his life.
The ending of this poem is extremely violent, but it is a "happy ending" for
it is expected, we have seen it approaching, it was prophesied by the
character Onorio Vasquez, and we welcome it as a release from what has
become intolerable pain and suffering. The man dies in his great leap from
the high cliff, the woman lives, with the man's child in her womb.
She climbed slowly down,
Rock to rock, bush to bush. At length she could see him
Lying softy, and there was somebody bending above him,
Who was gone in a moment. It was not so dreadful
As she had feared; she kissed the stained mouth,
And brought smooth stones from the shore until she had
covered
Her love against the vultures and salty gulls;
Then climbed up, rock to rock, bush to bush.
I have said that the setting of Jeffers' poems is a part of their greatness.
Rarely in literature has an author so passionately wedded his work to a
region. The Carmel coast and the Big Sur country belong to Robinson Jeffers
as surely as Egdon Heath to Hardy and Walden to Thoreau. This becomes
apparent to one who reads more than a few lines of Jeffers' poetry, but to
one who travels the coast between Monterey and San Simeon, or who climbs the
Santa Lucia mountains which rear like bison from the sea, the truth becomes
infinitely clearer. No sensitive person, least of all a poet, can experience
that coast without suffering a sea and a mountain change. Throughout his
poetry, narrative and lyric, Jeffers celebrates the splendors of the coast,
its seasons and weathers, its rocks and tides, trees, flowers and hawks. He
is in the great tradition of English nature poetry. He employs the coast as
a backdrop against which these dramatic narratives are acted out; and
although nature dwarfs the actors, it also ennobles them.
The ending of "Thurso's Landing," that other great narrative which was
written just a year before "Give Your Heart to the Hawks," also has a
terrible climactic ending, in which the woman cuts the man's throat and
poisons herself, high above the ocean on a wooden platform of an abandoned
lime-kiln.
The platform is like a rough plank theater-stage
Built on the brow of the promontory: as if our blood had labored
all around the earth from Asia
To play its mystery before strict judges at last, the final ocean
and sky to prove our nature
More Shining than that of the other animals. It Is rather ignoble
in its quiet times, mean in its pleasures,
Slavish in the mass; but at stricken moments it can shine terribly
against the dark magnificence of things.
Jeffers is not presently in fashion. The bright young men of the quarterly
reviews, who worship seven types of ambiguity, have no use for him because
he does not fit into their pre-conceived patterns of what modern poetry
should be. Confronted by the bulk of Jeffers, they are like the blind men
describing the elephant. Recently a reviewer of Time, a pipsqueak pundit,
called Jeffers a poetaster, a would-be poet. The timid are shocked by his
themes. The orthodox are outraged by his analysis of the origin of
religions. And of course the majority of people are indifferent to him, as
they are to all poetry above the level of Longfellow.
Public neglect or critical attack have never moved Jeffers to complain or to
reply. Since 1925 he has had enough of an audience to provide him with the
encouragement an artist needs. His later books have never been best-sellers,
but they are in print and they do sell. Royalties from "Medea," as we have
noted, were his first financial windfall since the legacy of 1912.
Writing last year in the New York Times Magazine, in one of his infrequent
prose utterances, Jeffers touched on this matter of a poet's audience and
his contemporary reputation. "It may seem unlikely that a poet will have
readers a thousand years from now, but it is not impossible, if he is really
a great poet; and these are the audiences whom he will habitually address.
If the present time overhears him, and listens too -- all the better. But
let him not be distracted by the present; his business is the future."
"'But,' a young man cries, 'what good will it do me to imagine myself
remembered after death? If I am to have fame and an audience, I want them
now while I can feel them.'"
"It seems to me, Jeffers replies, that the young man speaks in ignorance. To
be peered at and interviewed to be pursued by idlers and autograph hunters
and inquiring admirers, would surely be a sad nuisance. And it is
destructive too, if you take it seriously; it wastes your energy into
self-consciousness; it destroys spontaneity and soils the springs of the
mind. Whereas posthumous reputation could do you no harm at all, and is
really the only kind worth considering."
And now in closing, let me say that to one who, like myself, finds poetry a
necessary luxury, who reads some poetry every day and night of his life,
Robinson Jeffers is the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, he is an
inexhaustible mine of exciting stories, thoughtful lyrics, of stoic
philosophy and beautiful language. I hope that some of you have reached this
same conclusion and will go reading Jeffers long after this course is ended.
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