Robinson Jeffers lived in vast scenery opposite the vast Pacific on the coast of Monterey where he built with his own hands a tower in which he lived. His poetry is rugged as the hills of that landscape, with lines ragged as that ocean, and the spirit of the poet is most often likened in his poetry to a hawk. On the whole it provokes awe and enthusiasm, but it is not poetry to live with, because it lacks intimacy.

It is like a net with too wide a mesh which only catches the most cosmic experiences and the most ultimate feelings. Most of us, altho we may have such feelings, live most of our lives experiencing and feeling thru a smaller mesh, which is the scale of our own bodies, families, occupations. We do not live on rocky cliffs, under vast skies, and over great oceans. We do not act like hawks.

Death, however, is both an extreme and a universal situation, and these last poems of Jeffers, [in The Beginning and the End and Other Poems], in which he is largely concerned with his own approaching death, in which he discovers a metaphor for the approaching end of the world, imminent as a result of nuclear fission, are extremely moving. They may well be his best poetry.

They are written by a poet who remains completely in command of his own technical and intellectual resources. Jeffers shows an ability to express ideas which are derived from reading modern scientific works, which is very rare in modern poetry.

Lines such as these about the "volcanic earth" are both exact and exhilarating:

The view of life expressed here is tragic, heroic, but ul timately rather detached. Jeffers tends to see the earth in relation to the cosmos, history in relation to infinity. Destruction and defeat, indeed civilization itself, therefore, are not very important. What matters is affirmation, courage, a gesture of cosmic defiance:

I happen to disagree with this, because I think that consciousness is what gives significance to the universe, and for this reason it is not valuable to measure or weigh immensity against the littleness and brevity of man.

Without consciousness time and space would be meaningless, and meaning is what we exist for. Until it is proved that there is a super-consciousness inhabiting some other planet, the heroics of a poet such as Jeffers merely recommend the abdication of consciousness. But even if one rejects hisphilosophy, these poems confront one with final issues to choose among. They have imaginative grandeur.