Abstract
W. B. Yeats and Robinson Jeffers shared a vision of modernity which rejected contemporary values in favor of tradition. Both emphasized permanence in times of fragmentation and featured dramatic landscapes and cultural myth. Included among Modernist poets in spite of early Romantic influence and his commitment to formalist verse, Yeats fixed his gaze on the past, establishing the poetic terms of decolonization and interconnectedness of culture, place, and nature. Excluded from the circle of Modernist poets, Jeffers’s voiced what we call today ecocentrism—the earth or natural world rather than the human mind being the center of things. Jeffers’s ecoprophecy stems from his “attitude” of Inhumanism, a reaction to the failure and arrogance of humanism to provide human beings with god-consciousness. Both poets created mythologies, rooted their work in a sense of place, embraced the notion of cyclical theory of history, and incorporated elements of the supernatural. Both lived during times of dramatic historical change, rejected Christianity while retaining its symbolism and a belief in God, drew on Nietzsche’s ideas of eternal recurrence, and lamented the passing of traditions they valued, although for Yeats those traditions were founded upon older civilizations while Jeffers considered all civilization inherently corrupt and embraced solitude and ideas about the centrality of nature we have come to refer to as “deep ecology.” Both sought to create permanence though they knew all structures to be temporal, deploying imagery and symbols of stone and mortar to create the poetry of myth and timelessness.
Recommended Citation
Fleming, Deborah
(2012)
"Robinson Jeffers,W.B. Yeats, and Ecoprophecy,"
Jeffers Studies: Vol. 16, Article 4.
Available at:
https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/js/vol16/iss1/4