by Neal Whitman the Poetry Prof.
Welcome to a new feature. Yes, I am a retired professor. But, when you visit with me, I will not be writing as an English professor (which was not my field). Instead, I will be sharing what I believe deeply or professabout poetry. Some of my beliefs about the writing of poetry appear in a poem posted this month.
As a reader, I profess that poetry can and should be part of a daily, well-balanced diet. The National Endowment for the Arts agrees. The Big Read is an annual NEA program aimed to revitalize the role of literary reading in American culture. This year’s Big Read pick is Robinson Jeffers who lived and worked in Carmel-by-the-Sea on California’s Central Coast — “Continent’s End” he called it in his break-through poem that brought him out of obscurity into the mainstream of American poetry. You are on this website because you value short poetry. Do not be discouraged by his long narratives. Tucked into each Jeffers volume are short lyric poems written in rhythmic free verse that speak directly to you and me, the common reader. You can bypass his longer work by picking up Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems by Robinson Jeffers edited by Robert Haas (Random House, 1987).
Robinson and Una Jeffers, newly married and living in Los Angeles, had planned in 1914 to move to Lyme Regis in England on the coast of Dorset, not far from where the poet he admired most, Thomas Hardy, lived. But, war in Europe persuaded them to stay in America. A friend of Una suggested they instead turn to Carmel-by-Sea, and when the stagecoach topped the hill from Monterey, Jeffers later observed that they had come without knowing it to their inevitable place.
First renting a cabin and then in 1919 building a house on the tor overlooking Carmel Bay, Jeffers felt the “immense breadth of the continent” behind him and the “mass and double stretch of water” in front. His feelings for living there are expressed in “Continent’s End.” The editors of a 1925 anthology of California poets loved this poem so much that they made it their frontispiece and used it for the title of their book.
Life for all of us holds so many “What ifs?”. What if Robinson Jeffers had lived under the shadow of Hardy? What if those editors did not become his advocate? Would lovers of poetry travel near and far to visit his beloved Tor House and would Jeffers be this year’s Big Read?
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The poetry of Robinson Jeffers is “readable music” as The Poetry Prof suggests. Lyrical poetry, by definition, is meant to be musical, shown in “Natural Music,” the first poem in the recommended book (thanks for that recommendation; I found it in my local library!). Jeffers asks us to listen to “The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers…” Anyone who has been to the seashore or river bank, as I have, can relive those songs in Jeffers words.