Volume 49, Number 6 · April 11, 2002
Divine, Superfluous Beauty
By Charles Simic
The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers
edited by Tim Hunt
Stanford University Press, 758 pp., $75.00; $24.95 (paper)
The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers,Volume Five: Textual Evidence and Commentary
edited by Tim Hunt
Stanford University Press, 1,152 pp., $75.00
It wasn't always so hard making sense of things. When it came to Big Truth it was all settled. There were plenty of little truths for the poets and everybody else to busy themselves with, but they did not have to start from scratch and explain the universe. Then all of a sudden it happened. The silence of the infinite spaces and their own souls made them quake. One may argue about the date when one could no longer formulate with any confidence what the Big Truth was, but already in the nineteenth century, poets as different as Whitman, Dickinson, and Mallarmé found themselves philosophically pretty much on their own. By the time the twentieth century rolled around, the search for a new knowledge of reality and for an authentic self were the burning issues addressed by numerous, otherwise battling poetic movements. While rejecting Christian belief, the not-so-secret ambition of many of these poets was to write a poem about the absolute in an age suspicious of absolutes, and get away with it.
Review, 4098 words
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