The Atom To Be Split: New and Selected Essays on Robinson Jeffers

The Atom To Be Split collects new and selected essays by Robert Zaller on the work and career of Robinson Jeffers, whose prophetic verse, more than fifty years after his death, speaks increasingly to students of literature, history, science, and theology, as well as to readers concerned with the environmental and civilizational crises of our moment.

The opening essay of the book situates Jeffers in the context of the high Modernist generation, tracing the course of his reception from the deep impression he made on early critics as a poet not only of national stature but as one worthy of comparison with the great figures of world literature, through the controversies of his subsequent career and his growing rediscovery as an essential voice for our time. Subsequent essays include wide-ranging considerations of Jeffers' response to the critical social issues of his day, his engagement with historical and natural process, his place in philosophical tradition, the development of his distinctive aesthetic and moral stance, and his relationship to other significant literary figures including Thomas Hardy, Wallace Stevens, Pablo Neruda, Kenneth Rexroth, Czeslaw Milosz, and William Everson. The book concludes with fresh examinations of Jeffers' evolving concept of a divine cosmos and humanity's place in it, and the relevance of his vision for our own world.

Altogether, the essays in this volume refine and broaden the work of Zaller's previous studies of Jeffers, extending them in important new directions and offering a comprehensive perspective on Jeffers' unique and indispensable place in American literature.

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The Atom To Be Split: New and Selected Essays on Robinson Jeffers

The Atom To Be Split collects new and selected essays by Robert Zaller on the work and career of Robinson Jeffers, whose prophetic verse, more than fifty years after his death, speaks increasingly to students of literature, history, science, and theology, as well as to readers concerned with the environmental and civilizational crises of our moment.

The opening essay of the book situates Jeffers in the context of the high Modernist generation, tracing the course of his reception from the deep impression he made on early critics as a poet not only of national stature but as one worthy of comparison with the great figures of world literature, through the controversies of his subsequent career and his growing rediscovery as an essential voice for our time. Subsequent essays include wide-ranging considerations of Jeffers' response to the critical social issues of his day, his engagement with historical and natural process, his place in philosophical tradition, the development of his distinctive aesthetic and moral stance, and his relationship to other significant literary figures including Thomas Hardy, Wallace Stevens, Pablo Neruda, Kenneth Rexroth, Czeslaw Milosz, and William Everson. The book concludes with fresh examinations of Jeffers' evolving concept of a divine cosmos and humanity's place in it, and the relevance of his vision for our own world.

Altogether, the essays in this volume refine and broaden the work of Zaller's previous studies of Jeffers, extending them in important new directions and offering a comprehensive perspective on Jeffers' unique and indispensable place in American literature.

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The Atom To Be Split: New and Selected Essays on Robinson Jeffers

The Atom To Be Split: New and Selected Essays on Robinson Jeffers

by Robert Zaller
The Atom To Be Split: New and Selected Essays on Robinson Jeffers

The Atom To Be Split: New and Selected Essays on Robinson Jeffers

by Robert Zaller

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Overview

The Atom To Be Split collects new and selected essays by Robert Zaller on the work and career of Robinson Jeffers, whose prophetic verse, more than fifty years after his death, speaks increasingly to students of literature, history, science, and theology, as well as to readers concerned with the environmental and civilizational crises of our moment.

The opening essay of the book situates Jeffers in the context of the high Modernist generation, tracing the course of his reception from the deep impression he made on early critics as a poet not only of national stature but as one worthy of comparison with the great figures of world literature, through the controversies of his subsequent career and his growing rediscovery as an essential voice for our time. Subsequent essays include wide-ranging considerations of Jeffers' response to the critical social issues of his day, his engagement with historical and natural process, his place in philosophical tradition, the development of his distinctive aesthetic and moral stance, and his relationship to other significant literary figures including Thomas Hardy, Wallace Stevens, Pablo Neruda, Kenneth Rexroth, Czeslaw Milosz, and William Everson. The book concludes with fresh examinations of Jeffers' evolving concept of a divine cosmos and humanity's place in it, and the relevance of his vision for our own world.

Altogether, the essays in this volume refine and broaden the work of Zaller's previous studies of Jeffers, extending them in important new directions and offering a comprehensive perspective on Jeffers' unique and indispensable place in American literature.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780962277412
Publisher: Tor House Press.
Publication date: 09/01/2019
Series: none
Pages: 562
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.25(d)

About the Author

Robert Zaller is Distinguished University Professor of History Emeritus at Drexel University. In addition to writing highly regarded works in English intellectual, political, and constitutional history, he has published two previous books on Robinson Jeffers: The Cliffs of Solitude: A Reading of Robinson Jeffers (Cambridge University Press) and Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime (Stanford University Press). He is also the editor of Centennial Essays for Robinson Jeffers (University of Delaware Press) and The Tribute of His Peers: Elegies for Robinson Jeffers (Tor House Press). His honors include a Guggenheim fellowship and membership in the Royal Historical Society. In 2018, he received the Lawrence Clark Powell Award of the Robinson Jeffers Association for distinguished scholarship.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

Abbreviations xiii

1 Robinson Jeffers, American Poetry, and a Thousand Years 1

2 Tamar’s Oedipal Transcendence 17

3 Spheral Eternity: Time, Form, and Meaning in Jeffers 25

4 Land and Value: The Ecology of Robinson Jeffers 41

5 The Giant Hand: William Everson on Robinson Jeffers 53

6 Robinson Jeffers and the Uses of History 83

7 A Sketch for an Aesthetic: Process, Value, and Moral Beauty in Jeffers 101

8 “Home”: A “Lost” Jeffers Narrative 112

9 Robinson Jeffers, Narrative, and the Freudian Family Romance 121

10 The End of Prophecy: “The Double Axe” and the Nuclear Sublime 135

11 Jeffers, Rexroth, and the Trope of Hellenism 149

12 Hardy, Jeffers, and the Hero of Endurance 165

13 Punishing Horses: Animal Cruelty and the Symbolism of Evil in Jeffers 178

14 Incorporating the Sovereign Voice: Jeffers as a Dramatic Poet 192

15 Jeffers, Stevens, and the Decreative Sublime 205

16 “So Brave, in a Void”: Czeslaw Milosz’s Dialogue with Jeffers 216

17 Jeffers, Milosz, and the Crisis of Modernism 227

18 Jeffers and Neruda: Two Poets of the Pacific 240

19 The Theme of Resurrection in Jeffers’ Later Narratives 254

20 Jeffers’ Isolationism 279

21 Jeffers’ Hitler 292

22 “Mara”: The Poem of Foreboding 309

23 “Cheap Fausts and Vulgar Magicians”: Science, Technology, and

the Human Predicament in Jeffers 322

24 “A Terrible Genius”: Robinson Jeffers’ Art of Narrative 341

25 Robinson Jeffers and the Horns of Truth 359

26 Jeffers, Pessimism, and Time 378

27 Jeffers, Cosmos, and Mind 420

28 Jeffers and Divinity: “God” as a Signifier in the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers 440

29 Jeffers and the Anthropocene 493

Index 533

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