Abstract
In constructing Tamar and Other Poems Robinson Jeffers omitted many of the poems he’d written in 1919-1920 and previously in planned to use in the never published Brides of the South Wind. These poems clarify the aesthetic and conceptual conflicts that impelled such poems as “Salmon Fishing” and even the narrative Tamar. In particular, the 1919 lyric “Metempsychosis” and its subsequent recasting in 1921 as “The Hills Beyond the River” suggest that Jeffers’ sense of the dilemma of consciousness—consciousness of that which enables awareness of Nature, yet consciousness awareness of our alienation from Nature—is one key to understanding his poetic practice and the “philosophical attitude” that he later labeled “Inhumanism.”
Recommended Citation
Hunt, Tim
(2016)
"Turning from the High Lamps to Love the Low Hills: The Story the Story of Jeffers' "Metempsychosis" Tells,"
Jeffers Studies: Vol. 19, Article 3.
Available at:
https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/js/vol19/iss1/3