Abstract
This article examines Jeffers’ approach to both metaphor and archetype in poetry. In contrast to the poetic models available to him early in his career—Georgian verse and Swinburne, on the one hand, and the modernist school taking its cues from French Symbolism, on the other—Jeffers sought to ground metaphor in direct, sensory perception of the objects and circumstances of the natural world, which could yield figurative language that was either highly specific or broadly generalized. Naturally grounded metaphors enabled Jeffers to reckon with inhuman nature as well as with the simultaneously unique and problematic place of humanity within the natural order; however, he needed a different tool to represent his conception of divinity and the activity of the divine in and through nature. Here “archetype” comes into play, a term the article uses with reference to a posited twofold characteristic of the divine creation: creation as process, and creation as limit. The article shows how the image of a fountain serves as the archetypal form for the divine-creative process in Jeffers’ poetry (“inexhaustibly renewed energy”), and how the image of a net likewise functions as his archetype for existence’s limit (“the essential structure and boundary of the cosmos and the final barrier that constitutes it”). Examples from Jeffers’ narrative and lyric poems, drawn from all stages of his mature work, illustrate this thesis.
Recommended Citation
Zaller, Robert
(2020)
"The Fountain and the Net: Archetypes in the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers,"
Jeffers Studies: Vol. 21, Article 4.
Available at:
https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/js/vol21/iss1/4
