Jeffers's themes are … consistent from the beginning of his mature period (Tamar, 1924) till the end of his life (The Beginning and the End, 1963). He was a pantheist who believed that God is the evolving universe, a self-torturing god who discovers himself in the violent change which is at the center of life's dynamic. One need not go far in Jeffers to find that all his images are cyclic: cycle is the truth of the stars, the life of the planet, the fate of man, insect, and flower. Cycle moves through birth, growth, fullness, decay, and death. In ritual terms cycle translates into sacrifice (fragmentation of each entity at the cycle's end) and sacrament (reintegration and rebirth). For him, being involves change which is brought about only by violence and pain because each form resists its own dissolution. These realities, though customarily repugnant to man, are essential to beauty and divinity. For Jeffers there is only matter and energy; there is no spirit, or soul, or immortality (these being merely men's attempts to escape the cycle). God endures forever; man is a temporary phenomenon, something of an anomaly in the universe because of his megalomanie self-regard. But man is also unique, able to reflect on God. In fact man is, for the cosmic moment he endures, one of God's sense organs ("The Beginning and the End").

Consciousness is a universal quality of the cosmos, but man's participation in it will pass ("Credo"); beauty survives man's faculty to perceive it. Death is at the end of each cycle, ending the individual existence; the material from each man's body is reassimilated into soil and air ("Hungerfield"). Man's energy sometimes endures for a moment after death, like a St. Elmo's fire, in psychic phenomena. The world in its various rhythms is determined. The universe expands and collapses, oceans condense and evaporate, mountains and civilizations rise and fall; nations emerge and grow old. The mass of men is fated in its course, but the individual can choose to remove himself from the breaking wave, can stand apart and contemplate instead of being blindly caught. God himself (the pronoun of course is an anomaly) is in no way like man; he is savage, indifferent, and wild ("Hurt Hawks"), encompassing both good and evil. If seen wholly, all things are sacred and in harmony. Evil itself is only part of the mosaic of beauty, indicating the close of the cycle ("The Answer").

To Jeffers the task of living a "good life" lies principally in detachment from insane desires for power, wealth, and permanence, in a measured indifference to pain, joy, or success, and in a turning outward to God who is "all things." Wisdom, a word little used in his poetry except in irony ("Wise Men in Their Bad Hours") means cosmic perspective ("Signpost") and unfocusing from mankind (Jeffers's "inhumanism"). Peace, as cessation from strife, is an illusion in life. True peace is found in death; in life it can be anticipated in a stoic balance which discounts man's innate anxieties for immortality, invulnerability, stability, and immunity from pain and sickness. The great and most subtle temptation for the good person lies in the implicitly self-aggrandizing notion that one can change the world (saviorism). Jeffers himself must have desperately fought this "demon," he writes about it so often. He saw love as an abnormality of an incestuous race, leading to many other insanities. One love is pure: the love of God who is indifferent to man. Piety lies in an undistracted regard for beauty, earthly and cosmic. Terrible beauty is the god who commands worship. The poet is one who creates as God creates ("Apology for Bad Dreams"), who reconciles existence for man, putting man's preoccupations with sin, guilt, corruption, pain, and all other confounding fears and desires into saving context. The "good person" is not the leader, rebel, or savior; he is the selfcontained mystic, contemplating God and living out the necessary conspiracies of life with a certain aloofness (Tamar achieves this amidst her melodrama of family destruction).

Jeffers's art grew out of his life and vice versa; it was a consequence of his philosophy and of his sense of vocation. Once one grasps the dimensions of his beliefs, it becomes clear that Jeffers's poetry is incredibly centered and predictable. The theme of every poem, one way or another, is the divine beauty of the cosmos and the mutability of man. Jeffers has a deep sense of ritual, not only in nature's rites of death and renewal but in every rhythm of being. His ritual intent is strikingly evidenced in a letter to his editor in 1926, in which he explained that the movement of his narratives was "more like the ceremonial dances of primitive people; the dancer becomes a raincloud, or a leopard, or a God … the episodes … are a sort of essential ritual, from which the real action develops on another plane" (Selected Letters). He embraces tragedy in its pre-Sophoclean sense of the inevitable, blameless fall which yields new beginnings. "All life is tragic" translates into "all life is cyclic." Though civilized man flees the metaphysical implications of cycle, primitive man seems to have accepted and celebrated them. Characteristically in Mediterranean fertility cults, each year the cycle god, Attis, Osiris, Tammuz, Dionysus, had to suffer the consequences of reentry into being; each was born in order to die (and be reborn ten thousand times). Decline and death were not blameworthy or cataclysmic but inevitable and natural. Death is perhaps Jeffers's most frequent theme; it is a truth to understand, accept, and move within.

Of course subordinate themes abound in Jeffers's poetry, but they all bear on the truth of the cycle—human mutability, reconciliation with evil, confrontation of pain, indifference born of cosmic perspective, acceptance of God on his own terms, desirability of death and annihilation, inevitability of processes, delusion of human effectiveness, presumptuousness of man's self-importance, the nature of the poet's art, the omnipresence and beauty of tragedy.

The poetics of Jeffers are fairly simple and direct. His is a poetry of the external landscape, not the landscape of the mind ("Credo"). After the lyrics and semi-narratives of his first two books, he consciously avoided meter and rhyme. He replaced the first with the larger, more supple rhythms of Hebrew and Old English verse and the second with symmetries of parallelism and alliteration. Ten-beat lines are common in the narratives although there are many variations; four-beat lines are more likely in the lyrics.

Much of Jeffers's poetic effect comes through word-choice or diction. He chose words for etymology and for their successive layers of meaning. He kept a huge unabridged dictionary by his side and pondered word possibilities, sometimes for days. His imagery makes a fascinating study. Most of it is taken from his immediate coastal experience: hawks, herons, wild swans, pelicans, mountain lion, deer, and cattle; redwood, cypress, grass, wildflowers, rock, ocean, headland, clouds, sky, stars, and planets. Hawks are godlike, totem birds, representing what is noble and fierce. Lion and deer are the predators and victims, metaphors for all victimhood, neither blameworthy. Flora and fauna almost always fill a twofold function in his narratives: they are part of the realistic backdrop for the action; they also foreshadow the tragedy imminent in all drama, recalling animal surrogates of the year-gods and the sacrificial flowers which sprang from the gods' blood. Rock is a consistent image of God, mysterious chthonic presence and stoic endurance; it is volcanic origins, the bones of motherearth. The sea is a mind-subduing expanse, life and death, matrix of all life, source of story, change of season. Mountain and headland are measure of the heavens and reminder of human life's precariousness. Storm represents elemental apocalyptic forces; earth, air, fire, water (quake, storm, holocaust, and deluge)—all are fearful agents in Jeffers's narratives. Clouds are a dream medium on which the poet projects human folly ("The Great Sunset"). Sky and stars are the universe beckoning. Stars are used both mythically, as in the constellation patterns of Orion and Scorpio in "Tamar," but more often scientifically—gigantic atomic fusion furnaces whose lifespan predicts the fate of our sun and solar system ("Nova"). The far stars and galaxies are the ultimate actors of Jeffers's ultimate metaphor, the expanding and contracting universe which recycles every eighty-two billion years and is God's heartbeat ("The Great Explosion," "At the Birth of an Age").

Jeffers wrote and spoke little of his poetics. His 1938 foreword to Selected Poetry declares his intent to reclaim the subject matter which poetry had surrendered to prose. He meant to write about permanent things or the eternally recurring ("Point Joe"). He promised to pretend nothing, neither optimism nor pessimism. He would avoid the popular and fashionable; he would write as he believed, whatever the consequences.

In "Apology for Bad Dreams," an early ars poetica in lyric form, Jeffers indicates that he creates his narratives and dramas (bad dreams) principally for his own salvation. Using the vignette of a woman beating a horse amidst the magnificence of a coastal sundown, he attempts to reconcile man's perversity with the essential beauty of things. The landscape, he says, demands tragedy (pain, sacrifice, horror); the greater its beauty, the stronger the demand. It would seem that the poet wrote out these vicarious terrors in order to be spared the real terror of personal tragedy. Exactly what metaphysics is involved, Jeffers does not explain. He may write stories to educate himself to violence and the cycle, thus taking some of the terror out of the pain that he, as everyone, must endure. He may write as a form of therapy, letting out his inner violences, lest he act them out and beat horses himself. Or he may see in his writing a way of participating in being's ritual, acting out a discovery-process that parallels God's own creative process—a kind of "magic" (as he calls it).

Anyone who doubts the religious intent of Jeffers's poetry should read carefully the choric invocation in "Tamar" (section V), his first narrative poem of note. He calls on the god of natural beauty to enter into his "puppet" characters—a brother and sister who have just committed incest and the disintegrating family that surrounds them. God, Jeffers says, chooses the twisted and lame to be his signs and the agents of his revelation. For this same reason God has chosen him. The same kind of lyric interruption greets us in "The Women at Point Sur," Jeffers's most tortured and convoluted narrative. Here again he has created human grotesques, he says, to praise God, "puppets" to speak of him; they "stammer the tragedy." There are other writers, Jeffers tells us in the "Prelude" to the poem, who will tell tales to entertain; his vocation is to slit open the eyeholes in mankind's mask. Human resistance to God and to integration into the organic whole of the universe can be broken only by dramatic means ("Roan Stallion"): disorienting vision, limit-vaulting desire, unnatural crime, inhuman science, and tragedy. "These break [the mould], these pierce [the mask], these deify, praising their God shrilly with fierce voices: not in man's shape. He approves the praise" ("Roan Stallion"). Later Jeffers will clarify this view of storytelling and further its religious context in the lyric "Crumbs or the Loaf" where, in a parallel to Jesus's story of the sower and the seed (Matthew 13), he characterizes his narratives as parables, as contrasted with his lyrics which are confrontive apodictic pronouncements.

Jeffers's final statement on poetry comes toward the end of his writing career. In 1949, amidst the triumph of Medea and impending rejection of The Double Axe, he characterizes the truly great poet in an article for the New York Times, "Poetry, Gongorism and a Thousand Years." The poet, he says, stands alone. He renounces self-consciousness, over-learnedness, labored obscurity (by which Jeffers would probably have characterized most of contemporary poetry). He is direct and natural, saying what he must say clearly, out of the spirit of his time but as understandable for all times.

Elsewhere I have called Jeffers the "metaphysician of the West." Metaphysics is that most fundamental area of philosophy which studies being itself. Metaphysics has to deal with all that exists; it delves into the nature of all processes, of all that is—the workings and interactings of the universe and of the molecule and atom. "Of the West" suggests more than writing in and from the point of view of the West, or using its scenes as a setting. Jeffers does all these things, but his peculiar genius is his use of the West, the Far West, the continent's end and drop-off cliff of the world on which he perched his home, to explore the nature of being, the relevance of the human race, and the bridge between man and the furthermost expanses of the cosmos.

Jeffers represented his western landscape exactly; it stretched from Point Pinos in the north to Point Sur and Pfeiffer Beach in the south. This fifty miles of storm-scoured promontories, precipitous headlands, wave-wracked points, windtwisted trees, and precarious beaches was known intimately to him. It was the subject for solitary walks and family pilgrimages. The place names in his poems are almost all right off the geological survey map: Point Pinos and Joe, Robinson Canyon, Carmel Beach, Point Lobos, Mai Paso Creek, Notley's Landing, Palo Colorado Canyon, Rocky Point, Soberanes Reef, Bixby's Landing, Mill Creek, Little Sur River, Point Sur. The terrain, the beaches, the weather, the flowers, the animals are all true-to-life re-creations. Jeffers Country is no mythical Yoknapatawpha County; only the characters' names are made up.

Yet, in their own way, Jeffers's characters are authentic, arising as they do from the violent legends of this forbidding and isolating terrain. Someone has suggested that the Big Sur country causes madness because of something in its dynamic which either produces or attracts the grotesque, the macabre. Robinson Jeffers himself suggests this in "Apology for Bad Dreams." Jeffers's characters are ranch families, self-exiled hermits in shacks, wandering Indian cowboys from a previous era.

The land has never been domesticated; it is inconceivable that it ever will be; this is not so much remote backpacking country as impenetrable space. As one can see from the Sierra Club photo book, Not Man Apart, the coast is an almost continuous headlong precipice. The Coast Highway, an engineering triumph of the 1930s, strung a precarious ribbon of asphalt just above the drop-off, dynamiting through shoulders of rock, leaping over creek gorges with delicate butterfly bridges. Almost every winter a storm carries a lane of the highway into the sea. Behind this coast road are a few grassy knolls and fields, backed by wilderness. As one passes over it in a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco, one sees tightly corrugated peaks and gulleys choked with trees and brush—no roads, no lights, no water, no signs of life. This is wilderness in an almost mystic sense, a place to correspond to the empty places in the soul. One need not visit it; it was comforting to Jeffers just to know it was there and that it would never be humanized, subdivided, asphalted andfitted with sewer systems.

Very conscious of writing as a westerner, Jeffers perceived his land and his conscience as scarred with the vestiges of westward expansion. All around him were the ghosts of Indians who were too easy a victim to the white man's ambitions and diseases. San Carlos Mission, a few blocks from Tor House, presided over the death of local tribes. A spade on his knoll may turn over the remains of a tribal feast, abalone and clam shells and charcoal from their fires. Jeffers is conscious that his Carmel River mouth is the center of a line which marks the final coast of migrations which began millennia ago, first crossing Europe, then the Atlantic, and finally the American continent ("Tamar," Section V, makes use of this, as do "The Loving Shepherdess" and "Continent's End"). Somehow this coast sums up all migrations and all that men have done for good or evil in their "progress." Jeffers's Doppelganger, the self-stigmatizing hermit in "A Redeemer," summed it up: "Not as a people takes a land to love it and be fed, / A little according to need and love and again a little; sparing the country tribes, mixing / Their blood with theirs, their minds with all the rocks and rivers, their flesh with the soil … Oh, as a rich man eats a forest for profit and a field for vanity, So you came west and raped / The continent and brushed its people to death. Without need the weak skirmishing hunters and without mercy."

Jeffers is not a regionalist in the usual sense of the word—one who writes knowingly of his geographic section, reflecting its genius and foibles, relating its topographic and climatic peculiarities, reciting its idiom and its philosophy. The California coast for him is not a region; it is a final statement, a philosophical, metaphysical study. There are neither enough people nor customs in his mountains for regionally, and the landscape is unearthly, not picturesque. The final frontier is an ontological statement, not a geographic or cultural one. It is final as the coast is final—to all of mankind's hopes and illusions and indirections. America's violence, its rape of the land, its betrayal of the Indians, its pillaging of resources—all of these must ultimately be faced here.

Before concluding a discussion of Jeffers's themes and aesthetics, it is important to confront some of the objections to his writing—not in order to excuse his faults but to clarify his intent and identify his genre so that judgments may be better focused. With regard to his narratives, one can merely repeat what has been said above: Jeffers is a tragedian; he cannot write comedy for he saw comedy as an unfinished story. His stories are grotesque and usually end in blood. Whether he succeeded or not, his intent is to write parables, to instruct and to move his readers beyond their limits. His genre is, at an important level, ritualistic: that is, the story represents a Dionysian process, illustrating the cycles of life and death. His central characters, he says (in "My Loved Subject"), are the landscape: "Mountain and ocean, rock, water and beasts and trees / Are the protagonists, the human people are only symbolic interpreters." His human characters therefore are not primarily psychological or humanistic studies. Actually Jeffers chooses a sort of stereotyping (he has consistently called his characters "puppets"): his men tend to be Appolonian, stoic, cerebral, presumptuous that their power and plans will carry the day; his women tend to be Dionysian, sudden, intuitive, destructive; they are divine agents. Stories tend to follow the pattern of Pentheus's destruction by Agave in The Bacchae (Jeffers's version: "Humanist's tragedy"). The reader must be cautious: Jeffers should never be identified with his characters; their attitudes and statements are rarely or never his. He has no heroes or heroines, only maimed, floundering "idols." At some points Tamar, Orestes, and Fayne Frazer might be exceptions.

With regard to the short poems several additional precautions should be noted. Jeffers has many voices, the most prominent of which is, by far, that of prophet, a voice which may have been familiar to him out of the Old Testament literature of his childhood. The prophet primarily proclaims the truth, no matter how bitter the consequences. The prophet is a man obsessed and desperate to communicate. He has a vision of holiness which he sees desecrated usually by a middleor upper-class "establishment" who live by idolatry, injustice, and dishonesty. The prophet deals in exaggeration, overstatement, hyperbole. As Flannery O'Connor notes: For those who are almost blind, the prophet must write in huge caricatures; for those who are marginally deaf, he must shout. A prophet by definition must shock to communicate. But just as Isaiah did not rant and excoriate all of the time but also cajoled, admonished, comforted, and extolled, so Jeffers has other intonations and messages. At times he is pure mystic, praying to his God in the solitude of his tower as in "Night." At other times he is a teacher, reasoning and unfolding, suggesting how to live, as in "Signpost," "The Answer," or "Return." He can be a discerning philosopher as in "Theory of Truth." He can even be autobiographic as in "To His Father" or "The Bed by the Window." He could assume a sort of priesthood over the rituals of nature and celebrate their holiness and rhythms as in "Salmon-Fishing" and "To the House." He could turn himself inward to purify his art and sharpen his focus, always questioning the validity of his message and examining his poetic talents from the perspective of eternity as in "Self-Criticism in February" or "Soliloquy." Often his tones take on the gravity of the ecologist, lamenting the imbalance and guilts perpetrated by his own nation, or the apocalyptist, judging cities the ultimate idolatry and forecasting global purgation.

By this it should be clear that Jeffers should be approached with some patience and informed understanding. He cannot be summed up in one poem nor is he heard well until he has been listened to in several voices. He has often been dismissed by critics and the general reader as a misanthropist, pessimist, or nihilist. Isaiah might fall under the same charges. As one rightly balances the vitriolic rhetoric of the Old Testament prophet's first chapters with his Book of Comfort (Isaiah, chapters 40ff.) or his suffering servant songs, so one needs to balance Jeffers's heavier poems ("Summer Holiday," "November Surf," "What Are Cities For?", "Original Sin," for example) with the lighter, more positive statements: "The Excesses of God" or the final lines of "The Beginning and the End."

A final word on Jeffers's role as western writer. When one reviews the spectrum of themes from the literature of the West, one sees that Jeffers came to grips with all of them, he dealt with agrarian and pastoral types, the epic sweep of migrations, hero archetypes, violence, search for Eden, the disaster of the American Dream, Indian extermination, land and landscape, the mysticism of wilderness, immersion in nature, the folly of progress, the moral dilemmas of ownership, land-development, law, power, and greed. Grandson of an early pioneer of Ohio, he was inextricably involved in the nation's historical progress and in judgment upon it.

There is in his poetry a deep-seated ambivalence, arising from the clash between mystic and prophet. On the one hand he espouses an Eastern, Buddhist type of passivity and inner peace, assuming that nothing can be done. War, betrayal, moral and political corruption are variations of a natural process of decay that inevitably follows the cresting of nation's vitality and idealism. He can pro nounce this process "not blameworthy" as in "Shine, Perishing Republic." On the other hand he can, and more often does, deal with it with a heavy prophetic hand. Though he rejected the savior syndrome, heacted in many ways the redeemer whom he pictured in the short narrative by that title, "here on the mountain making / Antitoxin for all the happy towns and farms, the lovely blameless children, the terrible / Arrogant cities." He tried to base his peace in the philosophy of inhumanism. At times he seemed to reject not only American life but the life of the race as well. Yet he is ever conscious of his roots, ever ready to pay his "birth-dues," to discover new meanings for his people. The westering experience was for him the exemplar of all journeys. Western motifs gave him vehicles for a larger philosophizing. The continent's end provided a yardstick to measure the divine cosmos. The western shore was full of life, yet inhospitable, ancient and yet young, violent yet serene, a platform above the Pacific set for tragedy.