Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime

By Robert Zaller

Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime is the most comprehensive and most substantial critical work ever devoted to the major American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962). Jeffers, the best known poet of California and the American West, particularly valorized the Big Sur region, making it his own as Frost did New England and Faulkner, Mississippi, and connecting it to the wider tradition of the American sublime in Emerson, Thoreau, and John Muir. The book also links Jeffers to a Puritan sublime in early American verse and explores his response to the Darwinian and Freudian revolutions and his engagement with modern astronomy. This discussion leads to a broad consideration of Jeffers' focus on the figure of Christ as emblematic of the human aspiration toward God—a God whom Jeffers defines not in Christian terms but in those of an older materialist pantheism and of modern science. The later sections of the book develop a conspectus of the democratic sublime that addresses American exceptionalism through the prism of Jeffers' Jeffersonian ethos. A final chapter places Jeffers' poetic thought in the larger cosmological perspective he sought in his late works.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jan 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9780804781022

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Preface

One day while browsing in the American Library in Athens, an obscure impulse moved my hand toward The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, a book, like most of Jeffers’ work, then out of print. I opened the book, and fell right in.

At the time I knew no one conversant with Jeffers, and so no one with whom to share my sense of him as a great poet and my puzzlement at his critical neglect. I found a kindred spirit at last in William Everson, to whom I reached out when I began to write about Jeffers. His generosity and support—far beyond the merits of my work—inducted me into the community of scholars, poets, and lay readers being organized around the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation and its resourceful president, George L. White. It is my privilege and good fortune to have enjoyed that happy company, and that of the scholarly society which grew out of it, the Robinson Jeffers Association. Great writers exert a tidal pull on their students, and that shared experience has made many warm friendships for me. I am particularly indebted in the present work to Robert Brophy, Tim Hunt, Rob Kafka, and James Karman, but also to the many other colleagues who have shared their insights with me, and who will forgive me if I do not mention them by name in what, to do them proper justice, would be a list of unmanageable length. I again thank Dean Donna Murasko of the College of Arts and Sciences of Drexel University for the subvention that has helped make this book possible, and my editor, Norris Pope, for his support of a project quite different from my initial collaboration with the Stanford Press. I am grateful to the readers of the Press for their attentive and thoughtful appraisal of my manuscript. All remaining demerits are mine.

My previous study of Jeffers, The Cliffs of Solitude, examined his major narratives from a Freudian standpoint. This seemed a natural perspective, since Jeffers was the first American writer to consciously utilize Freudian themes and stratagems in his work. I believe this interpretive model remains fruitful, and it informs the fifth chapter of the present book. Nonetheless, this book is, as its title indicates, principally organized around the hermeneutic of the sublime. Through this, I have attempted to consider Jeffers’ work in the larger context of American literary and cultural history, and to situate him at what I believe to be one of its central crossroads. Jeffers occupied that crossroad with his contemporaries of the Modernist generation, but, although sharing many of the Modernists’ concerns and some of their stylistic innovations, he went his own way. His relation to the Modernists thus runs partly parallel to them, but is also in crucial respects adversarial. To draw this out fully is the work of another book. My intention here is to situate Jeffers in the tradition as he received it, transformed it, and, in my view, significantly enriched it.

My chief debt, as in everything I have written and everything I have done, is to my life companion, Lili Bita. As Jeffers said of his own mate, Una, she has given me eyes, but heart and resolve too. To her and to my loving family, this book is gratefully dedicated.

Introduction:

Framing the American Sublime

Robinson Jeffers, says Albert Gelpi, is the poet of the sublime without peer in American letters.¹ Despite this assertion, however, there are entire books devoted to the American literary sublime that fail to cite Jeffers. This omission is all the more striking when one considers how deliberately he made natural grandeur his subject, and the thoroughness with which he explored it.

The reason for this neglect is, in part, the tendency to marginalize Jeffers as a ‘lyric’ poet. A consensus has formed in some quarters that his long narrative poems, whatever their incidental felicities, are too overwrought to be fully successful works of art. The result is that the gist of Jeffers has been sought in his shorter poems, where his skill in evoking the beauty of natural process appears directly, unencumbered by dramatic apparatus.

The consequence of this critical attitude has been not only to diminish Jeffers’ project, but to decontextualize the so-called lyric poems themselves, in which the pressure of tragedy is continuously felt. Far from seeking to eliminate the human in his work, Jeffers sought rather to give it fresh, and, as he took it, perdurable meaning: to create, that is, a new sphere for tragedy in modern letters. The failure to appreciate this impoverishes the full complexity of his view of nature in turn. It also makes it difficult to apprehend him as a poet of the sublime, since the essential aspect of the sublime is the encounter of human cognition and agency with the natural world.

To instate Jeffers as a poet of the sublime is, therefore, to reaffirm his commitment to the human. To claim further, as Gelpi does, that he is America’s great poet of the sublime, is to place him among the central poets of our tradition. I hope this book will show why such a claim can be made.

A word must be said about the other term of my study. The hermeneutic of the sublime has a long pedigree, beginning with Longinus and entering the Romantic tradition with Burke and Kant. Is there, though, a distinctively American subspecies? We do not think of Wordsworth and Turner as representing an ‘English’ sublime, or of Goethe and Friedrich a ‘German’ one. Neither the nationality of the artist nor the particular topos described seems to require a nativist prefix. Why, then, in the American case?

The answer to that can be cast in terms both of Americans’ perception of themselves and of others’ responses to them. America remains the unique modern instance of a country settled originally on the basis of a prescriptive ideology, Calvinism, and politically constituted on the basis of another, democracy. I say modern to except ancient Israel, although the original intentions of the Hebrews in settling the southern Mediterranean shore are undoubtedly mystified rather than clarified by the retrospective depiction of a Promised Land. What is certain, however, is that the first New England settlers regarded themselves as the direct successors of Israel, and the wilderness they claimed as their own Promised Land.² Here they prepared, individually and collectively, for their encounter with God, the ultimate (if veiled) site of the sublime, and for the final revelation of his will in the world. Their purpose was consecrated, and so was the land that was to be cleared of encumbrances, both natural and savage, and made fit as the Lord’s tabernacle.

As Americans ventured further into the wilderness, however, they found not only a natural abundance denied them on the scanty soil of New England, but an enlarged sense of their destiny and the stage on which it was to be performed. This coincided with the waning of first-generation Calvinism itself and the chiliastic narrative that had been based on it.³ Americans did not lose the sense of their distinction and of their connection to a divine, or at any rate to a higher purpose. They concentrated increasingly, however, on exploiting the material blessings of the land vouchsafed them, leaving the ultimate enactment of that purpose to the fullness of God’s own time. At the same time, European conceptions of the sublime began to valorize the American wilderness. Rather than a place to be cleared for the erection of a tabernacle, America itself was seen as a natural temple in which a pantheist deity might be revealed, not in some culminating moment of history but as a perpetually available immanence.

Americans themselves, preoccupied with the practical problems of conquest and settlement, were slow to respond to this new vision of their land. A good example of the disparity between European admiration and American pragmatism is found in Tocqueville. His description of the Mississippi Valley is a splendid piece of Romantic scene-painting, informed, however, with a shrewd appraiser’s eye:

The valley watered by the Mississippi seems to have been created for it alone. There, like a god, the river dispenses good and evil at will. Nature has seen to it that the fertility of its bottomland is inexhaustible. . . . Nowhere have the great convulsions of the globe left more obvious traces than in the Mississippi valley. The whole aspect of the region attests to the effects of water. . . . The tides of the primeval ocean piled up thick layers of vegetable matter in the valley’s bottom, and with the passage of time these deposits were leveled out. The river’s right bank is lined with vast plains as flat as if a farmer had smoothed them with a roller. Toward the mountains, however, the terrain becomes increasingly uneven and barren. The soil seems pierced in a thousand places by primitive rocks, which stand out like the bones of a skeleton from which time has stripped away muscle and flesh. . . .

All in all, the Mississippi valley is the most magnificent place God ever prepared for men to dwell in, yet it is still but a vast wilderness.⁴

For Tocqueville, the valley and its river are one titanic presence, vastly extended in space and time, a scene of grandeur and half-concealed purpose, behind which lies the divine hand. The mode of description is scientific, the intent poetic, the very impersonality of the geologist’s rhetoric heightening the sense of an immanent sublime. At the same time, Tocqueville foresees the region’s domestication at the hands of man, a heroic (and divinely blessed) labor which tends, however, toward an inglorious result: cultivation.

The irony in this description becomes explicit in a later passage in which Tocqueville depicts the hospitality he receives in a homesteader’s log cabin. The cabin is set in land partially cleared, in which the trees have been cut but not uprooted; their stumps remain, cluttering the land they once shaded. It is a scene reminiscent of the setting of Jeffers’ own Apology for Bad Dreams: A lonely clearing; a little field of corn by the streamside; a roof under spared trees (CP 1: 208). As Tocqueville’s taciturn host offers provision, the visitor comments, our gratitude runs cold in spite of ourselves, for it is clear that he performs his office as a duty of the frontier, and wholly without pleasure. His wife, too, seems drained of spirit, her own energies, like those of her husband, entirely consumed by the struggle with a wilderness that is ready to reclaim the land at the first sign of slackening. Tocqueville comments: Their dwelling is like a small world unto itself. It is the ark of civilization, lost in a sea of foliage. A hundred paces beyond, the eternal forest spreads its shade, and solitude resumes.⁵

As Tocqueville realizes, American pragmatism is rooted in the imperatives of survival. It takes a certain breed of men—restless, calculating, and adventurous, as he describes them—to civilize a wilderness, and such men cannot afford excessive contemplation. Though they partake of the heroic, they are adversarial to the sublime, for it is the sublime that, ultimately, they are obliged to conquer and domesticate.

Hard on the heels of the settlers came a generation of plein air painters, the first to escape the studio conventions of academic European art and to join their Romantic compeers in forest and glen. Unlike, say, the French Barbizon school, however, American artists enjoyed the vistas of a still almost virgin wilderness. Their work was the first articulation of an American sublime which took raw nature for its subject and not merely its site.⁶ At the same time, it was deeply conflicted. American artists were not mere observers of the sublime; they were also, wittingly or not, its surveyors, sizing it up for demolition and recording it for posterity. The paradox of their situation, as witnesses of a transcendental scene that the act of vision itself profaned into history, gave an uneasy pathos to their work. To be sure, as Tocqueville had pointed out, the Mississippi Valley was itself geologically dynamic, the product of natural forces that continued to shape it. No scene, no matter how dramatic, was more than a passing event; all grandeur was provisional. It was still possible to see the guiding hand of Providence in natural as well as human history, as Tocqueville himself did; but it was equally possible to see both as autonomous processes, if not as competitive ones. If the hand of God did not shape nature to the viewer’s pleasure, the hand of man well might. Frederic Edwin Church’s much-admired The Heart of the Andes (1859) took this step. In search of an epitome of grandeur, Church created a virtual landscape, reshaping actual sites into a composite that contained at once soaring mountains, fertile plains, wide rivers, and plunging waterfalls. Although the genre of fantastic landscapes was well established in Europe, with Church we enter the modern picturesque, with the human imagination superseding the handiwork of God.⁷

That Church had rearranged the tropics rather than any American scene was yet another portent. The Heart of the Andes was an act of sovereign appropriation with imperial no less than aesthetic overtones. Manifest destiny had already had its prophet, however, in Thomas Cole, whose The Course of Empire (1834–1836) depicted the degradation of the natural sublime by human agency in five monumental canvases.⁸ Cole’s theme was not the sublime as such but the dangers of hubris in the early American republic. Using the conventions of Claudean landscape and Vico’s tropology of the epochs of civilization (gleaned by way of J. M. W. Turner), he showed the transformation of primeval wilderness into Arcadian pastoral, its virtual disappearance in imperial, urbanized splendor, and its repressed return in the phase of empire’s collapse. In his first canvas, The Savage State, Cole offers a rugged landscape that appears more undisciplined than sublime, with tossing foliage, scudding waves, rearing thunderclouds, and primitive Indian settlements. In The Pastoral or Arcadian State, it has been transformed by cultivation and husbandry into a picture of serenity, the water becalmed and the sky cleared. All that remains of it in The Consummation of Empire, a scene represented by temples, fountains, concourses, and gilded statuary, is a glimpse of distant peaks covered with suburban dwellings, and a placid bay filled with pleasure boats. In Destruction, the bay is roiled, the peaks are bare, and the great city is falling to barbarian conquerors as the smoke of pillage rises into a menacing and almost engulfing sky. Nature is not, however, the victor but merely the scavenger in Desolation, the last of the series, in which a lone pillar juts into the sky and even the neighboring hills seem reduced to rubble. Wild vines crawl up the pillar’s sides, and a pelican nests at its top. But wilderness itself is irrecoverable, and the loss of a second Eden, like that of the first, cannot be reversed.

Cole does not valorize wilderness as such in The Course of Empire. Nature is subordinated to history, and degraded in if not indeed by empire’s fall. Its situation is hence pathetic rather than sublime. Nonetheless, something more than human tragedy is enacted here, and the spoliation of natural grandeur adds to the sense of transgression. As a wild, second Eden, America offered the world itself a new redemptive possibility. For it simply to reenact the fate of former empires would be not only a deep disappointment but a kind of blasphemy.

Cole’s vision, then, is still rooted in the Puritan conception of American exceptionalism, and the wilderness as a site marked out by Providence. The progress of America’s material civilization, involving as it did the clearing rather than the consecration of that site, led to an anxious preoccupation with what remained. The ever-retreating frontier appeared as a rapidly diminishing stage on which American destiny, whether couched primarily in religious or democratic terms, might still be realized. Following the Westward settlement with their easels, discovering still grander vistas, the painters reassured themselves and their public that sufficient time and space yet remained to fulfill that destiny, even as the very act of artistic representation recorded the reduction of both.

The discovery of California’s gold at mid-century rapidly accelerated the process of settlement. It also led to the unveiling of the site that would become, and still remains, America’s final place, the ultimate symbol of its natural grandeur. Yosemite Valley, a giant, glacier-carved gorge in the California Sierras, was a scene to rival Frederic Church’s synthetic landscapes: sheer cliffs, dramatic monoliths, cascading waterfalls, verdant glens.⁹ Albert Bierstadt, a German-born and -trained artist whose career bridged the traditions of the European and American sublime, made it his particular subject in a series of canvases that attracted attention on both continents. Bierstadt conceived Yosemite as a Garden of Eden . . . the most magnificent place I ever saw.¹⁰ It was an Eden, however, from which the human presence was to be banished, not after but before transgression: unlike his other landscapes, the Yosemite series contained no trace of human (or, for that matter, animal) presence. One might call this a pre-Darwinian sublime, the pristine world of creation rough-hewn from God’s hand before the taint of sentient life, which, as Darwin implied for many of Bierstadt’s generation, led inexorably to human transgression, and the degradation of the divine handiwork evident in mass wilderness clearance and commercial exploitation. This Creation of the Fourth Day, as it were, showed rather a world in which titanic forms—El Capitan, Sentinel Rock, and the Cathedral Rocks are clearly visible—coexist with a placid plant and arboreal life that softens their rugged outline and offers a partially domesticated if still imposing sublime. This is a world partly valorized by its closer temporal relation to God—closer, that is, to the first moment of creation itself—and partly by the absence, not to say the negation of man. The climactic work of the series, Sunset in the Yosemite Valley (1868), offers a dramatically lit prospect in which the descending sun, glimpsed around steep cliffs through a golden nimbus, seems to lead back in time as well as space to the divine source.¹¹

Nature is thus apostrophized, in Bierstadt and in other pictorial, photographic, and literary representations of Yosemite, as a transcendent value, at once the site, source, and symbol of divine manifestation. At the same time, man, formerly the bearer of divine signification and value, is excluded from this vision. If Yosemite is, as Bierstadt saw it, a Garden of Eden, it is one that may be glimpsed only from the outside. Man, having been expelled from the original temple and forever seeking it anew, has found it at last on the final, continental shore, only to realize that he can never reenter it, but only gaze from afar. It is not that his presence would profane it, but that he is profanation itself; the sacred repels him. Yosemite is not man’s long-sought sanctuary from the postlapsarian world, but Nature’s sanctuary from man, the haven denied him. That he has found and beheld it—the apparition of Eden, primeval and undefiled—is only the seal of his exile.

Modern environmentalism, the movement to preserve what remained of the wilderness from human taint and corruption, emerged as a response to such sentiments. Partly the revulsion against the desecration of a divinized or at least an aesthetically valorized landscape, partly the attempt to maintain it in the more subtly appropriated form of a heritage for succeeding generations, and partly as a means of preserving it as a site of future redemption, environmentalism was fed by complexly interacting and sometimes contradictory values. Robinson Jeffers became its approved poet, an imprimatur placed on him by the Sierra Club’s immensely popular publication of Not Man Apart (1965), whose title was taken from a line in Jeffers’ The Answer, and which consisted of photographs of the California wilderness set against stanzas of his verse.¹²

With modern environmentalism, or at least the most extreme wing of it, the American sublime entered a cul-de-sac. If the sublime was construed as the encounter between man and the natural world that revealed the divine—and therefore the common participation in divinity that reconciled both—then to exclude or suppress the human was to annul it. In Bierstadt, the sublime remains accessible only as mediated, second-order experience: the spectator is permitted access to the scene of the sublime, but only through its artistic representation. One might argue that the absence of human figures in his Yosemite series invites the spectator to substitute himself as privileged witness. Nonetheless, the terms of his exclusion are clear. Just as the frame of the painting (and the glass covering, railing, or electronic sensor that might forbid access to it) proclaims that one may look but not touch, so its subject communicates a similar message. Denied entry into Eden, the spectator may behold it as a pilgrim, or in modern terms as a consumer whose appetite must be ever sharpened but never slaked. The National Park system, which permits physical access to the wilderness along specified trails or by lookout point vistas framed by railing, extends the prohibition and refines the exclusion. In Bierstadt, we are looking, perforce, at a single perspective, but one that represents at least the painter’s own direct experience, which we are invited to share through him and which he has represented for us. We have not beheld Yosemite bare, but he has, and what is offered is at least a record or memorial of the sublime. The modern park visitor, gazing at the prepared vista, sees a simulation carefully crafted from the real thing. He validates his experience by turning to the nearby diorama or postcard rack that faithfully reproduces what he has just seen: the replica of a replica.¹³

Representations such as Bierstadt’s pointed up the inherent and seemingly insuperable paradox of the modern sublime. If the essence of the sublime was the human encounter with prime nature, it was an encounter that presupposed the alteration of one term of the equation alone. On one side was overwhelming, annihilative experience; on the other, imperturbable magnificence. As a theory of aesthetic (or religious) perception, this did not require the advent of an Einstein or a Heisenberg to reveal its inadequacy. To the extent that the human agent alone experienced transformation, his agency—even figured as mere presence—was suppressed. As a passive receptor, he stood literally outside the scene of the sublime, and was therefore no more a participant in it than the spectator of Bierstadt’s paintings. (We will leave to one side the question of how works of art themselves are transformed, or rather informed, by the spectator’s gaze.) If the encounter of the sublime was not in some sense dynamic and transactional, the sublime itself could be experienced only as nostalgia, a longing for experience rather than the experience itself. The gates of Eden remained closed.

The exclusion of the human agent from the scene of the sublime, however, or at any rate the insistence that his experience of it be mediated through barriers that, as in the case of the park, kept him from direct engagement with it, thinly concealed the anxiety that, in fact, the sublime could only be maintained as a fiction because the power of alteration flowed not from nature to man but the other way around. The clearing of the wilderness by settlement and the very necessity to preserve nature by limiting or excluding human access made it obvious that the effects of natural grandeur on man paled in comparison with those of man on nature. The natural sublime, as the ground of immanent divinity, sanctified man; by the same token, the wanton destruction of wilderness desecrated nature. Jeffers makes the point vividly through the mouth of the unnamed protagonist of his late poem The Double Axe: The human race is bound to defile . . . / Whatever they can reach or name, they’d shit on the morning star / If they could reach (CP 3: 260).

With these words, the sublime appears to reach a point of negation. The encounter with the sacred is rejected; the temple is polluted, not to say vandalized. Language profanes whatever cannot be otherwise touched; cognition itself is a species of violation, and consciousness, as Jeffers says in the mid-period narrative Margrave, is a contagion (CP 2: 161).

The adventure of the American sublime, however, was not limited by the encounter between individual subjectivity and natural grandeur. Such had been its principal basis in Europe, where the landscape had long been domesticated and where even industrialization had merely replaced the pastoral. For Europe, the sublime meant a revaluation of the familiar, a new way of seeing what was already known. There was no question of discovering new Edens, but, as in Blake, of rediscovering the Eden already underfoot.

The terms of the sublime were different in America. The wilderness had been, originally, the site of redemption, of no more intrinsic value than a stage is without the play to be performed on it. As that first drama receded with the ebbing of Calvinist faith, it was gradually replaced by the contested ethos of democracy, whose grand visionary was Thomas Jefferson. Man’s liberation was to be not from sin but from tyranny; his reward was not grace but freedom; his paradise was not heavenly but terrestrial. With Lincoln, especially the Lincoln of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, America’s own secular redemption became a universal imperative, and the travail of its Union the template of human destiny. As the struggles of ancient Israel had been a pattern for the pilgrim fathers, so now the nation they had founded, having come to maturity and crisis, was to be a light for all mankind.

The great poet of the democratic sublime was Whitman, for whom sublimity resided in himself and his fellows, in man as such. For Whitman, too, the Civil War was a defining experience, the fratricide that seemed to negate the natural comradeship of man and man, but which also called it forth at a deeper level as compassion and solidarity in the face of humanity’s tragic limit, death. Democracy, then, like its Calvinist antecedent, exposed death, and the attempt to transcend it, at its core. Whitmanian gregariousness was a compact against death, and individual liberty, always in tension with the larger community, found its immortality in the triumphant survival of the democratic collective. As heaven was the terminus of the Puritan sublime, and revelation that of the terrestrial one, so history was for the democratic sublime.

These, too, were questions that engaged Jeffers. His own Jeffersonianism was of a limited, conservative kind, without the imperializing rhetoric that characterized the Declaration of Independence or the acquisitive policies of Jefferson’s presidency. He was deeply skeptical of all uses of power, and rejected any prospect of redemption through historical process. Indeed, though his poetic engaged the sublime at virtually every point, it was resolutely anti-apocalyptic. His view of all process, whether natural or historical, was cyclical, a vast, recurring chord without final resolution.

Jeffers’ rejection of all tropes of finality was hard-won; the powerful undertow of thanatos, the generalized impulse toward death and disintegration hypothesized by Freud,¹⁴ strongly characterized his early work, and remained a part of its deep structure. It is on this ground, indeed, that Jeffers most closely approaches Whitman, as his perhaps darker brother. I have dealt with the Freudian aspects of Jeffers’ work in a previous study,¹⁵ but they remain, in part, germane to this one. In construing an Oedipal sublime, Jeffers was not merely reacting to but enriching the tradition of the American sublime, since it was he who first introduced the Freudian hermeneutic into American letters.

Jeffers’ Freudianism was mediated by an earlier influence, that of Emerson and the Transcendentalists. What Jeffers took from Emerson was less a doctrine than an attitude, that of the individual confronting the sublime with nothing but native courage and wit, and finding, or shaping, something of himself in it. Such an attitude finally partook too much of the self for Jeffers’ mature taste, and seemed to compromise the resolute monism of his religious and philosophical vision. Nonetheless, the Emersonian hero was important as a model for the transgressive protagonists of Jeffers’ narratives, in whom the quest for divine truth was confounded with the desire to incorporate it. Jeffers found in this the basis of tragic (and Nietzschean) hubris, but his ultimate exemplar was the figure of Jesus, in whom Oedipal transgression and religious striving were inextricably mixed, and to whom he turned repeatedly in his narratives and verse dramas.

As Jeffers was the first poet to induct Freudian thought into American letters, so, too, was he the first to reckon with the implications of the most recent avatar of the American sublime, nuclear catastrophism. With the advent of the atomic age, the American sublime came in a sense full circle, linking hands with the Calvinist apocalypse in a vision of the end of history. Like Puritanism, it was implicitly redemptive for a chosen elite, who were now to be not the elect of an inscrutable God but the designated survivors of the nuclear State, which, in the fashion of New England’s deity, appointed life for the few and death for the many. This recrudescence of Calvinist primitivism in the guise of modern science appalled Jeffers, not least for its Promethean arrogance, and called from him a final assertion of divine sovereignty and human limitation.

It is the contention of this book that Robinson Jeffers, more than any other figure in our literature, has comprehensively engaged and crucially defined the American sublime. There were, to be sure, interpreters and prophets of it before him, but it was he who gathered up its varied strands into a coherent whole. It might be said that he made his great synthesis only at the point at which the sublime had become hypertrophic—a concept to be invoked only with a certain ironic distance, if not, as in Stevens, to be largely inverted. Yet it seems to me that the notion of the sublime expresses a conundrum of modern experience that we have rather laid by than put behind us. In that sense, a poetics of the sublime still points the way ahead for us, and not merely a road already traveled. If the vitality of the sublime is not particularly apparent in American poetry at present—a poetry, for the most part, of small risks—it still manifests itself in other genres, notably painting. Indeed, if we consider it in its full context, it appears deeply interwoven with the fabric of American culture as such. This alone justifies our exploration of it in its most salient figure.

1

Heavenly Meditations

I

American literature was forged on the anvil of Plymouth Rock. Those whose faith brought them to the wilderness believed themselves to be God’s chosen, the latter-day Israelites whose mission was to prepare a tabernacle against the coming of final judgment. That judgment hung over each of them, and only the unmerited grace of God averted its execution. Faith told the Puritan that his salvation was assured; doubt warned him that it could never be assumed. Doubt was the Devil’s temptation, but also God’s sure prescription against pride and arrogance. To live in the conviction of God’s mercy was to suffer torments unknown to the reprobate. It toughened souls by breaking them again and again. The pride of election gave way, with repeated humiliation, to the deep recognition of unworthiness. In that knowledge alone was the full blessing of grace revealed. So were God’s first children in the New World made. The repeated encounter with a divinity whose countenance was now revealed, now hidden, was the first birth of the American sublime.

This first sublime was in many respects a pattern for the rest. It involved a single individual, a site of encounter, and a divine presence. The site was a cleared space. It might be the mind itself, prepared by invocation and prayer. The rhetoric of English Puritanism was charged with images of the Old Testament wilderness, but the godly seeker did not wander abroad in search of the divine; he retreated to his prayer-closet, where he might not only purge himself of extraneous thoughts and impressions, but be safe as well from the constable’s inquest or the derision of the profane. In the New World, however, the wilderness was not metaphor but reality, and clearing space a practical task. Each family grappled with a natural environment at once threatening and nurturing, like the demanding God whose gift it was and whose bounty and obligation it directly represented. Hostile, inclement New England, whose domestication began with the very name given it, was also the sacred preserve of the godly. The impulse to appropriate it was checked from the very beginning by the divine immanence it manifested. New England was God’s harsh, second Eden, a garden to be entered by reverent toil.

This was the foundation myth. America was both a divine gift and a prize to be won, at once given and withheld, a paradise of earthly plenty and a fearsome sanctuary to be profaned at mortal risk. These polarities relaxed in time, just as the Puritan notion of a consecrated community of the elect did in the half-way covenants of later colonial New England, and, finally, in the secular triumphalism of a conquering white race that spread itself from ocean to ocean, and in Jeffers’ words raped / The continent and brushed its people to death (A Redeemer, CP 1: 407). This was the potent story of a fall from grace and the quest for new redemption, even if the terms in which it was once construed—covenant, election, salvation—were no longer credible, or at any rate no longer bore their original signification. To tell it required recovering some of the moral force and authority of the first Puritans, if not their dogma, their intolerance, and their pride. This meant, to a degree, reconstructing the core element of the Puritan sublime, the sense of the land as the site of divine encounter, but purged of credal presuppositions and responsive to the challenges posed by modern science.

We shall see in subsequent chapters how Jeffers approached this task. In the present one, however, I wish to suggest how he borrowed and reshaped the characteristic literary form of Puritan expression, the meditation, as a vehicle for his verse. New England Puritanism had relatively little commerce with poetry and less with fiction, but it produced a rich literature of religious counsel and exhortation, and remained in intimate contact with the literature from abroad that had provided its prototype. The elect soul, shattered by the personal experience of sin and conversion required of each new member of the community, needed continual monitoring, guidance, and support, for the uninstructed conscience was a snare for the Devil.

The meditation had an ancient pedigree. In its canonical form, it stretched from Origen and Augustine to Ignatius of Loyola and François de Sales. It was adapted to Protestant requirements in Puritan England and New England, and rebaptized, as it were, in Richard Baxter’s The Saints Everlasting Rest, first published in 1650. As Louis L. Martz defines the distinction between the Catholic and Reformed traditions, the former emphasized the dialectic between God’s omnipotence and his charity: his awful power to crush, his constant will to save. God’s grace was always available; it had only to be sought. Systematic meditation, especially as defined in Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, was a powerful means to that end. For the Puritan, in contrast, salvation was available exclusively to the elect, while for others only the terror of God’s judgment remained. Accordingly, meditation was a comfort only to the elect, for whom it afforded a prevision of heaven; for the reprobate, it opened the gates of hell.¹

To the elect, meditation was not merely a comfort but an assurance. Even the saints, the term applied among the godly to signify the elect, might know doubt and trepidation—indeed, were far more prone to it, as the most spiritually sensitive members of the community. The ability to meditate, which involved severe self-scrutiny (the examination of one’s particular sins and general unworthiness) tempered by Scriptural contemplation (the balm of God’s Word), was itself a strong sign of one’s election. As Baxter put it: Sirs, if you never tried this Art, nor lived this life of heavenly contemplation, I never wonder that you walk uncomfortably, that you are all complaining, and live in sorrows, and know not what the Joy of the saints means.²

Heavenly meditation—Baxter’s term of art—is not merely a source of comfort; it is also a duty, as with the exercise of any power of the soul. Indeed, it is the highest duty, as it involves the highest power, and brings to focus all the soul’s capacities:

I call it the acting of all the powers of the soul to difference it from the common meditation of students, which is usually the mere employment of the brain. It is not a bare thinking that I mean, nor the mere use of invention or memory, but a business of a higher and more excellent nature. When truth is apprehended only as truth, this is but an unsavoury and loose apprehension; but when it is apprehended as good, as well as true, this is a fast and delightful apprehension.³

As the soul’s aim is to strive after God, so it must pursue him, zealously, in every manner by which he may be known. Just as God has enabled us to apprehend and enjoy the world through our carnal senses, so spiritual senses are provided that we may enjoy a foretaste of heaven. The saint may not forgo any part of the banquet that God spreads before him, for, as Baxter concludes, If in this work of Meditation thou do exercise knowledge . . . and not exercise love and joy, thou dost nothing; thou playest the child and not the man; the sinner’s part and not the saint’s.⁴ To refuse any part of God’s creation is to refuse it all.

The connection between the legitimate enjoyment of the world through the physical senses and the anticipation of heaven’s delights was crucial to the Puritan sublime. The theme of spiritual ravishment had been central to the Christian mystical tradition from the beginning, as had the use of carnal metaphors to express it. Spiritual joy was ineffable; to make it palpable to others or even to oneself, it was necessary to invoke states of physical plenitude and rapture that were at best imperfect analogues of spiritual experience, and, in the hands of the vulgar, mere travesties of it. The resulting linguistic tension was inescapable. At one extreme it issued in a Manichaean rejection of the world; at the other, in ecstatic fusion with it.

As Robert Daly has emphasized, Puritan praxis fell between these extremes of worldly revulsion and lyric exaltation. On the one hand, the world was the gift of the creator, however deformed by human sin. Its value in these terms was indefeasible. On the other hand, that value was not fulfilled in itself. The ultimate function of the world was to prompt the soul toward the contemplation of God.⁵

It is only recently that the Puritans’ positive valuation of the natural world has been given its due. Earlier scholarship, neglecting the background of Protestant iconoclasm from which the Puritan tradition emerged, took the paucity of visual representation in it as evidence of its rejection of the sensual. But the Reformed emphasis on the Word makes literature rather than the plastic arts the logical place to look for a proper understanding of Puritan attitudes toward the world. In sermon, treatise, and verse, the world was represented as a gift of God’s grace, albeit an abused one; as the site of the saint’s necessary travail; and as the prefigurement of his ultimate comfort.

These topoi were common to Puritanism both in Old and New England, but confrontation with the American wilderness sharpened the conceptual issues raised by the natural landscape. As familiarly known and lovingly mapped as England was, so the uncharted American continent, the savage Eden to which the faithful had been driven by the hand of persecution, presented itself both as a fearsome desolation and a field of wonders. The terrors inspired by the New England wilderness are well documented—they would still echo in Robert Frost three centuries later—but its beauty and abundance found voice as well in Anne Bradstreet, and, even more strikingly, in the Massachusetts Bay poet William Wood, who offered an almost Jeffersian catalogue of:

The princely Eagle and the soaring Hawke,

Whom in their unknowne ways there’s none can chawke:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The King of waters, the Sea-shouldering Whale,

The snuffing Grampus, with the oyly Seal,

The storm presaging Porpus, Herring-Hogge,

Line shearing Sharke, the Catfish, and Sea Dogge.⁶

The New World was a harsh land, yes, and populated by predators; but Princely and royal ones, the signature of a sovereign God. Its beauty and bounty were, as the poet Richard Steere put it, Gracious Ernests of God’s care for his saints, and of his future love. The greater one’s responsiveness to the natural world, the clearer was one’s understanding of the divine nature and the more perfect one’s visualization of heaven. In Anne Bradstreet’s words:

Sure he is goodness, wisdom, glory, light,

That hath this under world so richly dight;

More heaven than earth was here, no winter and no night.⁷

Certainly, the contemptus mundi tradition was alive and well among the Puritans. The godly were told to abjure worldliness, however, not the world. As Steere puts it:

When we’re Commanded to forsake the World,

Tis understood its Vices and Abuses;

For certainly its good is not intended.⁸

To spurn God’s gifts, in short, was as severe an offense as to embrace the Devil’s snares.

To be sure, the world’s beauty was not to be compared to heaven’s, just as there was infinite disproportion between the saint’s felicity on earth and the joys of the hereafter. The absence of a proportion did not mean the absence of a relation, however. Baxter pointed out that Scripture itself depicted paradise in words that are borrowed from the objects of sense . . . As that the Streets and Buildings are pure Gold, that the gates are pearl. These images were figurative but not hollow, for the spiritual senses could only be awakened by stimulating the imaginative capacity, and that in turn by a fit appeal to physical sense. Carnal images did not describe, but they did signify.

What, though, signified a fit appeal? The physical senses were a two-edged sword: while they might be pointed to a higher reality, they were far readier to sink toward a baser one. The paradigmatic appeal was through the Word itself; God was the master poet. But the Word required enlargement, outwardly in sermon and disputation, inwardly in prayer and meditation. Either way, it entailed new figuration.

Puritanism was thus not only hospitable to the poetic imagination, but dependent on it. Spenser and Milton make the case readily enough. Whereas the great Puritan poets of England engendered fictive landscapes, however—Arcadia, Eden—New England Puritanism was tied to the American prospect in a unique and essential way. As Perry Miller describes it:

The New England communities of the 1630s . . . . entered into a holy society upon their own volition, inspired by their devotion to the word of God and their desire for pure ordinances; they joined in the migration deliberately in order to found sanctified commonwealths, and by that very act swore a covenant with God not merely as individuals but as a people. The first and unquestioned premise of the New England mind was the conviction that unlike other states these had not come into being through accident, by natural growth or geographical proximity, but were founded in the conscious determination and free will of the saints, who had migrated for the specific ends of holy living.⁹

The eschatological implications of this could hardly be overstated. As Sacvan Bercovitch puts it, quoting Cotton Mather, "What seemed merely another worldly enterprise, financed by British entrepreneurs, was in reality a mission for ‘the Generall Restoration of Mankind from the Curse of the Fall.’"¹⁰ By the terms of the Covenant, the Puritans became God’s people under the dispensation of the New Testament as the Israelites had been under the Mosaic code of old, and New England was—literally, as John Cotton explained—the new Canaan, a sanctified land for a sanctified people. Hitherto, the elect had been scattered among the unregenerate, polluted by contact with them and suffering with them the wrath of a just God. That was England. But now, by withdrawing from defilement and throwing themselves unreservedly on God’s mercy in a daunting wilderness, they had cleared both the psychic and physical space to fulfill his will. As Bercovitch concludes finely, It was reserved for Americans to give the kingdom of God a local habitation and a name.¹¹ The name was New England.

The core elements of the Puritan sublime—the praise of God in a redemptive wilderness, the duty of meditation, the metaphorical construction of divinity in terms of the world’s beauty—are almost a programmatic description of Robinson Jeffers’ verse. There remains an even more direct link, however: the man who may be regarded as the last in the apostolic succession of New England Puritans, Jeffers’ maternal ancestor Jonathan Edwards.

It was Frederic Ives Carpenter who first suggested the connection between Jeffers and Edwards.¹² Their affinities were temperamental as well as genealogical. Edwards’ nature, like Jeffers’, was softened by matrimony; he described his wife Sarah as having a sociability and an instinctive rapport with the natural world that he lacked, and, Uncomfortable with the idle chat of his parishioners, as a biographer remarked, he counted on Sarah to carry him through, to close the distance.¹³ More substantively, Edwards sought to incorporate the Newtonian science of his day into his theology, as Jeffers would the Darwinism of the late nineteenth century and the new cosmology of the twentieth in his verse. Both men contemplated scientific careers in their youth, and Benjamin Silliman, the foremost scientist of early nineteenth-century America, remarked on discovering an early paper by Edwards on flying spiders that he might have been another Newton had he pursued his science.¹⁴ The compliment was excessive, but the point it offers is instructive: Edwards did not come to his science as a theologian seeking a rational justification for his faith, but as an enthusiast who never doubted the convergence of science and theology in the same unitary truth. As Miller remarks, he regarded [science] not as an alien body requiring incorporation into Christianity, but as a language of God by which one could learn to refashion the language of theology.¹⁵ For Edwards, God was manifest in the natural order, which reflected both his creative will and his determination to effectuate it through natural process, and which culminated in the free will—the moral agency—of regenerate man. Accordingly, there was a unique and inseparable connection between divinity and humanity, a refraction of one in the other. As another of Edwards’ commentators puts it, Since the divine and human mind are related—that is, since the elect reflect both a natural image of their Creator and something of His excellency—whenever the saint turns his telescopic eye within, he gazes upon a moonlike self mirroring divine reality.¹⁶

This view was qualified by two considerations. First, the privileged relation to divinity, although in theory a species attribute, was in fact available only to the elect, for it was precisely the spark of divinity within them that the reprobate rejected. Second, the disproportion between God and man was so great, the contrast between divine glory and human abjection so stark, that even the worthiest of the elect were an abomination. As Edwards told his congregation in his most famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (one which, according to witness, reduced it to terror):

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes, as the most hateful and venomous serpent is in ours.¹⁷

In his attempt to make human vileness sufficiently vivid, Edwards even sacrifices his beloved spiders. It is not, however, that spiders are loathsome, but merely that humans regard them as such, that makes them suitable as a metaphor. In fact, man alone is vile, and creation is blameless and holy in respect of him:

Were it not that so is the sovereign pleasure of God, the earth would not bear you one moment; for you are a burden to it; the creation groans with you; the creature is made subject to the bondage of your corruption, not willingly; the sun does not willingly shine upon you to give you light to serve sin and Satan; the earth does not willingly yield her increase to satisfy your lusts; nor is it willingly a stage for your wickedness to be acted upon. . . . God’s creatures are good, and were made for men to serve God with, and do not willingly subserve to any other purpose, and groan when they are abused to purposes so directly contrary to their nature and end.¹⁸

If humans are granted a share in the divine mind and its inestimable gift of moral agency, they are correspondingly wicked and culpable when they reject these blessings to serve sin and Satan. Thus, humanity can appear both as uniquely chosen and uniquely iniquitous, fulfilling God’s edict or flouting it, completing his creation or defiling it. This radical dichotomy—the valorization of man as the capstone of God’s order, his rejection as lower than the least of brute creation—will not appear again in American letters until Robinson Jeffers. As for Edwards himself, he ultimately chose a voluntary exile after being cast out by his congregation, and he spent his last years preaching to the Housatonic Indians—a tribe less corrupt than the elect.¹⁹

II

The figure who connects Edwards and his Puritan forbears to Jeffers is Emerson, the New England sage who was both poet and preacher. It was Emerson who rediscovered Edwards as a cultural icon and reinterpreted him as a precursor of Transcendentalism. As Perry Miller observes, both men in their separate epochs represented the Puritan’s effort to confront, face to face, the image of a blinding divinity in the physical universe, and to look upon that universe without the intermediacy of ritual, of ceremony, of the Mass, and the confessional.²⁰ Emerson, of course, was no Calvinist; for him free will was not given man that he might conform himself to God’s law, but that he might search for him in the immensity of a world that bore everywhere the sign of his presence but nowhere the trace of his commands.

Jeffers imbibed Emerson thoroughly in his youth, admired him into young adulthood, and showed his influence in his early verse.²¹ The influence remained, but settled. Behind