Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime

Robert Zaller

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780804781022
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria en la poesía

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.

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 ...