2. I like these comments about Robinson Jeffers: *Poet, critic, and anthologist Louis Untermeyer praised Jeffers for his “gift of biting language and the ability to communicate the phantasmagoria of terror.” Critic Selden Rodman noted that Jeffers wrote his poetry “with a one-dimensional straightforwardness that is almost Homeric. And the similes he uses, if not Homeric, are as primitively American as the flintlock and the Maypole.”* I have on my bookcase, in a small container made from an orange peel, two small chips of granite picked up the day my son and I climbed up the narrow staircase of Tor House, the small stone house and tower he built for his beloved Una. Dont tell anyone. Cawdor changed my perception of the world. A couple of his small poems: * To The Stone-Cutters Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore defeated Challengers of oblivion Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down, The square-limbed Roman letters Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well Builds his monument mockingly; For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun Die blind and blacken to the heart: Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found The honey of peace in old poems. * ... and this very patriarchal, but incisive, thing: Let Them Alone If God has been good enough to give you a poet Then listen to him. But for Gods sake let him alone until he is dead; no prizes, no ceremony, They kill the man. A poet is one who listens To nature and his own heart; and if the noise of the world grows up around him, and if he is tough enough, He can shake off his enemies, but not his friends. That is what withered Wordsworth and muffled Tennyson, and would have killed Keats; that is what makes Hemingway play the fool and Faulkner forget his art.
Posted on: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 17:04:37 +0000
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