Robinson Jeffers
17 quotes
Biography
John Robinson Jeffers was an American poet known for his work about the central Californian coast. Much of his poetry was written in narrative and epic form; however, he is also known for his shorter verse and is considered an icon of the environmental movement.
"I've changed my ways a little, I cannot nowRun with you in the evenings along the shore,Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment,You see me there."
"There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death."
"You ask what I am for and what I am against in Spain. I would give my right hand of course to prevent the agony; I would not give a flick of my little finger to help either side win."
"Corruption never has been compulsory; when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains."
"The first part of "The Double Axe" was written during the war and finished a year before the war ended, and it bears the scars; but the poem is not primarily concerned with that grim folly. Its burden, as of some previous work of mine, is to present a philosophical attitude, which might be called Inhumanism, a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person. This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and may again. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty."
"Come little ones, You are worth no more than the foxes and yellow wolfkins, yet I will give you wisdom. O future children: Trouble is coming; the world as of the present time Sails on its rocks; but you will be born and live Afterwards. Also a day will come when the earth Will scratch herself and smile and rub off humanity: But you will be born before that. Time will come, no doubt, When the sun too shall die; the planets will freeze, and the air on them; frozen gases, white flasks of air Will be dust: which no wind ever will stir: this very dust in dim starlight glistening Is dead wind, the white corpse of wind. Also the galaxy will die; the glitter of the Milky Way, our universe, all the stars that have names are dead. Vast is the night. How you have grown, dear night, walking your empty halls, how tall!"
"Poetry is bound to concern itself chiefly with permanent aspects of life."
"I decided not to tell lies in verse. Not to feign any emotions that I did not feel."
"His spiritual insights were in three major areas: First, he has inspired mankind to see the world anew as the ultimate reality. Second, he perceived and described the physical universe itself as immanently divine. And finally, he challenged us to accept the ultimate demands of modern science which assign humanity no real or ultimate importance in the universe while also aspiring us to lives of spiritual celebration attuned to the awe, beauty and wonder about us."
"Robinson Jeffers was no scientist, but he expressed better than any other poet the scientist's vision. Ironic, detached, contemptuous like Einstein of national pride and cultural taboos, he stood in awe of nature alone."
"The sheer magnificence and vastness of the coastal environment — an epitome of the true wilderness of the world — stood as a reminder that all human life is a mere flicker within something unimaginably greater. Jeffer's western wilderness was a key to perceiving the essential wildness of the universe as a whole, in which human personality is only something like a lichen on a rock. No tall heroics for Jeffers."
"To Robinson Jeffers the earth was hopelessly prostrate."
"Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it."
"Cruelty is a part of nature, at least of human nature, but it is the one thing that seems unnatural to us."
"The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, life is your child, but there is in meOlder and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean."
"The heads of strong old age are beautiful / Beyond all grace of youth"
"The greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe."