Abstract
This essay pays homage to Robinson Jeffers’s totemic presence as a shaman-poet of Carmel-by-the-Sea, where the essay’s author was born in 1956. It views shamanism as a symbolic process of transformation that takes place at an emotional, instinctive, and spiritual level; as a method of ecstasy found throughout Jeffers’ poetry and prose from beginning to end of his career. The shamanic archetype takes on concrete form through Jeffers’ ritual enactments of his dreams, spirit visitations, visions, and shamanistic voices that sound to him from Native influences. Science gave Jeffers a vision to behold the world’s spiritual traditions from a vista that places Nature in a position of superiority over all previous religious revelations. As a poet-shaman Jeffers gazes into the black crystal and he arrives at a vision of the immense beauty of things on the Pacific Coast. Hawk Tower represents Jeffers’ new religious symbol as a self-constructed shrine for his life and work: a place of worship where the concept of dark energy, contained in light and dark matter, could be meditated upon before physics had a concept for it. A photo of Jeffers taken in 1925 by Lewis Josselyn, illuminates this idea by way of a stupendous image.
Recommended Citation
Herrmann, Steven B.
(2012)
"The Shamanic Archetype in Robinson Jeffers Poetry,"
Jeffers Studies: Vol. 16, Article 2.
Available at:
https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/js/vol16/iss1/2
