Abstract
For its artistic originality and intellectual depth, The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948) by Robinson Jeffers ranks as one of the major works of political poetry in American literature. This collection also became one of the most controversial books ever published by an American poet. Jeffers wrote his scathing rebuke of America’s wartime foreign policy at the peak of the country’s euphoria over winning the “good war.” He condemned Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s incessant war mongering leading up to America’s intervention in that conflict. In Jeffers’s telling, Roosevelt lied the country into the war, concealing his real motive all the while. Charles Austin Beard, America’s foremost revisionist historian during the interwar period, essentially made the same criticism of the president. Having failed with the New Deal to bring the country out of the Great Depression, Roosevelt after 1939 sought to save the capitalist system with a war economy, which would become the basis of an American hegemony over the world. The planning for just such an outcome began even before Pearl Harbor. Washington propaganda about the Four Freedoms deflected attention away from the economic and strategic aims of the American war effort. The article surveys and evaluates the possible influence of Beard on Jeffers as he wrote The Double Axe and Other Poems.
Recommended Citation
Drake, Richard
(2016)
"Charles Austin Beard and Robinson Jeffers: A Historian and a Poet Against the American Empire,"
Jeffers Studies: Vol. 19, Article 2.
Available at:
https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/js/vol19/iss1/2