Descent to the Dead (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Robinson Jeffers
- First Published: 1931
- Type of Work: Poetry
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Traveling or travelers, Human race, England or English people, Death or dying, Ireland or Irish people, Time, Tombs or graves, Monuments
Descent to the Dead, occasioned by a visit Jeffers and Una paid to Ireland, the land of their ancestors, and England in 1929, is the major sequence of short poems composed by the poet. Most of the works commemorate monuments of ancient cultures—cairns, cromlechs, graves, and standing stones—attempting to re-create the human consciousness that entered into their construction. Jeffers is most concerned with drawing connections between disparate moments of time, both to bridge the immense gulf between them and to mark humankind's beautiful insignificance in the context of...
[The entire page is 634 words long]
