"Tamar" and all the final three-fifths of this book [Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems] were exhaustively reviewed by James Daly in Poetry [in August, 1925] so that the present writer need only record her hearty agreement with that review, her recognition of the "deep poetic compulsion" in Mr. Jeffers' usually distinguished art. All the more is it to be regretted that the title-poem of this larger book, if not 'prentice-work dug up and retouched, as I suspect, is of a quality quite unworthy of the author of "Tamar." But it is doubtful whether even the most accomplished artistry would excuse the deliberate choice of so revolting a subject. Apparently Mr. Jeffers wanted to see how far he could go with himself and his newly acquired public; and we may be permitted to express a hope that the poet has now registered his final limit in a direction so repellant to modern taste.

Mr. Jeffers was brought up on classic literature, his father being a professor of Greek; therefore the class of subjects under discussion may come to his mind more naturally than to another's. But whereas to the Greek poet all the pagan energies of life were open ground for his spirit, ground almost sanctified by his myth-haunted religion, to a poet of our time and country it is impossible to explore certain jungles in the old simple and natural way. He has to force himself in; he is conscious of breathing noxious vapors in a dark melodrama of evil. The Greek audience accepted quite simply the horror as well as the beauty of its inherited myths; but the world has lived a number of centuries since then, and all the dark power of Mr. Jeffers cannot quite persuade us to swallow his modern tales of abnormal passion with the simple inherited faith of a more primitive time. The danger is that such a preoccupation may make his majestic art an anachronism, without vitality enough to endure.

In "The Tower Beyond Tragedy" the subject is appropriately Greek—the Clytemnestra story—and the poet's version, while too expansive, has passages of splendid eloquence, done in huge pounding rhythms like the Pacific at Carmel. Here are nine lines of Cassandra's despair:

For me there is no mountain firm enough,
The storms of light beating on the headlands,
The storms of music undermine the mountains, they stumble and fall
inward.
Such music the stars
Make in their courses, the vast vibration
Plucks the iron heart of the earth like a harp-string.
Iron and stone core, O stubborn axle of the earth, you also
Dissolving in a little time like salt in water….

This Cassandra ranges over the centuries; her prophecies reach out to the day "when America has eaten Europe and takes tribute of Asia, when the ends of the world grow aware of each other."

One turns with relief to the shorter poems which follow these. Here we have a stern and stately beauty, the expression of a harsh loneliness of soul which has studied the world afar off as it communed with sea and mountains. Perhaps this brief one, "Joy," will suggest the sweep of this poet's imagination and the temper of his spirit; also his way of striking off vivid images in lines of mournful music:

Though joy is better than sorrow, joy is not great;
Peace is great, strength is great.
Not for joy the stars burn, not for joy the vulture
Spreads her gray sails on the air
Over the mountain; not for joy the worn mountain
Stands, while years like water

Trench his long sides. "I am neither mountain nor bird
Nor star; and I seek joy."
The weakness of your breed: yet at length quietness
Will cover those wistful eyes.

Not that Mr. Jeffers has been unobservant of passing events, or unpitiful of human agony. In "Woodrow Wilson," a dialogue between "It" and the hero's death-enfranchised soul, we have a really noble tribute, a high recognition of tragedy. Here are the first two of the eight stanzas:

I should like to quote lengthily from "Night," with its proud recognition of newly discovered immensities of space—

A few centuries
Gone by, was none dared not to people
The darkness beyond the stars with harps and habitations.
But now, dear is the truth. Life is grown sweeter and lonelier,
And death is no evil.

"The Torch-bearer's Race" shows man "at the world's end," where, all coasts and jungles explored, he is daring the air, "feet shaking earth off." But the poet reminds him:

Brooding on his rock over "the deep dark-shining Pacific," this poet has watched the course of stars and nations, and the music of his verse has acquired large rhythms. What he thinks of his own nation in its hour of splendor he tells in the poem "Shine, Perishing Republic," which may be quoted as of immediate interest, and representative of his art in one of its less detached moods:

A poet of extraordinary power is Mr. Jeffers, with perhaps a purple pride in the use of it.