David J. Rothman
A Prophecy of the Present: W. S. Merwin and the Legacy of Robinson Jeffers
This essay began life as an introduction for W. S. Merwin, who delivered the keynote address at the 13th annual Robinson Jeffers Association Conference, which was held in Honolulu, at the University of Hawaii, in February, 2007. I am grateful to many members of the association for their comments on the draft.
W. S. Merwin has been well-known in the American poetry world for more than 50 years. He was the Yale Younger Poet for 1952 and won his first Pulitzer in 1971 for The Carrier of Ladders. His recent elevation to the post of US Poet Laureate, however, has brought renewed attention to his life and work, and it therefore seems like a good time to reconsider his achievement. Merwin is a highly original poet and also an extraordinarily learned one who nonetheless wears his learning lightly. He is prolific in many genres, from lyrical poetry to narrative, from literary memoir to translation from multiple languages; he has been outspoken on a wide range of political issues since his determined opposition to US involvement in Viet-Nam and with a focus in recent years on the mistreatment of the Hawaiian people by the Europeans who conquered the islands, so powerfully presented in his book-length narrative poem of 1998, The Folding Cliffs. He is also a passionate environmentalist, and criticism of human destruction of the natural world has run through his work from the beginning. As all this suggests, the range of literary and extra-literary traditions on which he draws is prodigious. My purpose here is only to highlight one that has been generally overlooked: his highly original engagement with a great American literary predecessor, Robinson Jeffers, and along with Jeffers and others, his participation in a particular strain of American poetry that traces its roots directly back to Calvinist theology. Jeffers and W. S. Merwin share some astonishing similarities, from the apparently coincidental to the profound. One way to suggest them quickly is to generalize at the level where we hypothetically fuse their lives and work into a single writer. This eccentric exercise leads to some interesting conclusions about what each writer has done and how they both may fit into a larger tradition. Our amalgamated writer spent his early life on the east coast, much of it in Pennsylvania. His father was a Presbyterian minister named William. His mother was named Ann, or Annie. A precocious student who entered college when only fifteen or sixteen, our writer also pursued post-graduate work but never earned an advanced degree, although he did achieve mastery of a number of classical and Romance languages, among them Latin, Greek, Spanish, and French. His translations and adaptations of works in these languages inform his original writing and are well-known, including a successful translation of Euripides. Our writer was prolific and popular, becoming as famous as an American literary poet of his time could be. As a young poet, his prosody underwent a transformation, moving from a tightly formal structure characteristic of the day to a more open line and flexible syntax which is nonetheless informed by unusual rigor, and this seemed to free his muse. At the same time, he would sometimes return to the forms of his younger life, occasionally going so far as to insert a fully-formed sonnet into his later work. He was prolific, sometimes publishing lengthy books only a few years apart. While highly influential on his contemporaries, he never formally affiliated with any school, college or university. He determined to live in what can only be called a fiercely independent way, devoted to his art and to a number of social and political causes which are inextricably entwined with that art. In pursuit of his calling, our writer eventually moved as far west as he could in America, and bought a small estate overlooking the Pacific on a wild stretch of coast, where he worked with local artisans to design and build his own home. He lovingly tended his garden, planting many trees. He vociferously and passionately opposed American military involvement in the wars of the day, and he expressed this dissent in his art. He carefully studied the history, culture, flora and fauna of his new western home, writing many lyrics about it and setting narrative poetry of epic ambition there. His view of modern civilization and in particular of America's future prospects could be characterized as gloomy at best. He saw current events as an indication of the corruption of democracy and of imminent "institutional and moral collapse." At a certain point, while still relatively young, our writer abandoned the Presbyterian faith of his fathers, although he retained a strong sense of spiritual calling. Among other things, he became a preeminent—perhaps the preeminent—poet of the natural world in his day. To call this work "nature poetry" is to miss the point. It is a poetry in which, as Mark Jarman, another Presbyterian minister's son (and grandson), who also has close ties to the American west, has said, "Nature becomes the elect." It is an ecological poetry, deeply versed in science and looking outward at the inhuman world, in which human beings play only a small part, and not usually a particularly admirable part at that. Indeed, in our writer's work, human behavior often manifests itself as tragic and sorrowful at best, idiotic and destructive at worst. At the same time, his poetry is charged through and through with wonder at and love for the creation, including even, on occasion, man as a part of that creation. Love poems sparkle like diamonds throughout his oeuvre. Despite tremendous differences between the two writers, everything outlined above applies equally both to Jeffers and to Merwin, right down to that astonishing coincidence of the identical names of their parents, William and Ann. Indeed, shortly after WW I, Merwin's father studied at Western Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, the same institution where Jeffers's father taught from 1877 to 1903. I do not wish to be misunderstood. Despite the fascinating correspondences, Merwin is not a follower of Jeffers in the way that, say, William Everson was. I expect neither Jeffers nor Merwin would feel comfortable with that suggestion. And Merwin has certainly secured his own claim on the last fifty years and on the present. Yet Jeffers and Merwin have followed some similar paths and participate in many of the same traditions. Each of them has made those traditions new in ways that we needed their work in order to imagine. Each is fiercely independent in his art and in his life. Each is an avatar of the natural world, both as garden and as wilderness. Each is a poet of fierce social and political dissent. Each is a poet of vast learning—historical, linguistic, philosophical, scientific—who nonetheless has managed to integrate that learning into a passionate and powerful art. Each is a poet of place, very much tied to a western coast, and yet also of cosmic consciousness, of both matter and spirit. Each understands tragedy, and has closely studied not only its ancient roots but also its modern manifestations. Each is deeply troubled by America and harshly critical of it, yet both are utterly American, standing in a long line of Calvinist or post-Calvinist visionaries. To expand on this a bit, one could argue—though no doubt with some resistance from the poets themselves—that both Jeffers and Merwin stand in an American poetic tradition that owes something to Reform theology, specifically Presbyterian dissent. In addition to Merwin and Jeffers, other poets to consider in this light might be Wallace Stevens (who once referred to himself in a letter as "a dried-up Presbyterian"), Marianne Moore (whose maternal grandfather and brother were Presbyterian ministers) and, among contemporary poets, Wilmer Mills and especially Mark Jarman. These are not poets of explicit Presbyterian faith, a very separate group including contemporary devotional poets such as J. Barrie Shepherd, Ann Weems and Ruth Bell Graham (the late wife of Billy Graham). Rather, Jeffers, Moore, Stevens, Merwin and Jarman are poets who all either left the church early or have had more complex relations with it, whose poetry ranges from the heretical through the skeptical or theologically detached (the case of Moore, who was not alienated from her faith but who does not address it in her work), to the difficult embrace. Jarman is a special case, one of the most gifted and ambitious contemporary poets to directly engage Christian faith, especially beginning with his sixth book Questions for Ecclesiastes (1997). Yet, unlike Shepherd, Weems and Graham, Jarman's epiphanies, doubts and struggles look outward to a far larger audience than what he might hope to find within his own church. As he said in a recent interview, he thinks of himself "as a rather anxious Christian with an affectionate regard for the natural world." In terms of how he integrates that faith into his poetry, he goes on: "Think of the ways very specific cultural and racial themes have come to dominate poetry. Faith is simply one more, and as such the poet who would write about faith has to work extra hard to invite a reader who does not share that faith into his or her poem. This is where angularity of paradox or skepticism becomes crucial. We are moved by struggle more than certainty, even when struggle resolves into the certainty of faith." Given Jarman's background in the American West and in Presbyterianism, his interests (the eponymous working-class heroine of his book-length narrative poem Iris is a passionate admirer of Robinson Jeffers and makes a pilgrimage to Tor House, his home), his passionate dissent from mainstream poetics when young (during his time editing The Reaper) and more, he seems the closest among the living to the tradition under discussion here. I am unsure what to call all of this taken together as a whole in the case of Jeffers and Merwin (and perhaps Jarman), for these poets are certainly not "Presbyterian" in any specifically theological sense. But I would hazard that in his range and ambition, Merwin, like Jeffers before him, and perhaps in some sense like Jarman in the following generation, is a prophetic poet. I do not mean prophecy in the sense of foretelling the future, but rather in the sense of speaking honestly of the present and what it may be and mean at its core. I will hazard just one broad theological observation that bears upon this question of post-Presbyterian prophecy, or spiritual testimony in Merwin and Jeffers. For many generations, the various branches of the Presbyterian church in America have looked to the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647 as their foundational theological document. The document has been many times amended, most notably in 1789 and 1903, but despite these revisions, the document that would have influenced the families of all the poets under discussion here retains the most direct line from Calvinism of any major Protestant creed. This is not the place for a full discussion of Presbyterian theology and its relation to modern poetics, a subject worth extended study, much as Whitman's Quaker background has received, Eliot's conversion, Ginsberg's Judaism and so on. At the same time, even a quick take on certain passages from the Westminster Confession is suggestive for our purposes. In particular, parts V, VI and VII of Chapter I ("Of the Holy Scripture") all pay homage to scripture as being of divine origin; at the same time, however, these passages acknowledge and indeed exalt personal testimony unmediated even by scriptural learning, let alone priests, bishops or even presbyters if it comes from a regenerated soul. Part V reads in full as follows: "We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the Church to an high and reverent esteem for the holy Scripture; and the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man's salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God; yet, notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth, and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts." The believer who had accepted Christ was therefore "justified" (to use the earlier Puritan term) in his subsequent actions, which were understood as his "sanctification." It was not only accepted, but expected that the believer would thus bear witness to his "full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth" through personal testimony and action. This doctrine strikes me as a kind of spiritual coaching about how to testify to truth, however transformed it is in poets such as Jeffers and Merwin. It is in exactly this sense that I mean that their work is "prophetic": both poets wish to testify of a sanctified creation, Edenic but for the intrusions of man. Their passion for prophetic testimony has roots. We see this prophetic strain even in Merwin's earlier work. In the brief lyric "For the Grave of Posterity," which appeared in The Moving Target, Merwin's fifth book, published in 1963, he speaks of an end to time, but that eschatology is reenacted again and again in each reading of the poem: This stone that is
Not here and bears no writing commemorates The emptiness at the end of History listen you without vision you can still Hear it there is Nothing it is the voice with the praises That never changed that called to the unsatisfied As long as there was Time Whatever it could have said of you is already forgotten. This may only be a young poet trying not to worry about how his work will be seen in the future, so that he can write in the present. At the same time, Merwin is far more suggestive than that, imagining an apocalypse of dissolution, "The emptiness at the end of / History," and, perhaps to make it clear he is not dealing merely in Hegelian categories, "Time." It is a poem of stupendous negation: the absent stone without writing commemorates an emptiness beyond history and time that those without vision can synaesthetically hear, although it is nothing. This absent voice commemorated by the absent stone calls out praise, but only to the unsatisfied. And further… “Whatever it could have said of you is already forgotten.” God may be gone and yet the impulse to speak of that absence truthfully and in a searing vision of emptiness still reverberates with a sense of loss so deep it seems to recapitulate a Calvinist fall from grace. The poem is a supremely cogent vision of the void, and that cogency has the urgent tone I am calling “prophetic” here. It is uncannily similar to the periodic and intense syntax of documents such as the Westminster Confession. For better or worse, it is probably impossible for any reader of Jeffers to encounter "For the Grave of Posterity" and not immediately think of "To the Stone-Cutters," "To the Rock that Will Be a Cornerstone of the House," "Oh Lovely Rock," "Inscription for a Gravestone" and other similar Jeffers poems and their comparably sublime openings from mortality into an indifferent eternity via the contemplation of stone, whether inscribed or not. "Inscription for a Gravestone" presents dissolution as a natural phenomenon rather than Merwin's more abstract, temporal one, yet both poems turn us away from ourselves and our individual extinction to contemplate our eventual fusion with a larger, mythical entity: I am not dead, I have only become inhuman: That is to say, Undressed myself of laughable prides and infirmities, But not as a man Undresses to creep into bed, but like an athlete Stripping for the race. The delicate ravel of nerves that made me a measurer Of certain fictions Called good and evil; that made me contract with pain And expand with pleasure; Fussily adjusted like a little electroscope: That's gone, it is true; (I never miss it; if the universe does, How easily replaced!) But all the rest is heightened, widened, set free. I admired the beauty While I was human, now I am part of the beauty. I wander in the air, Being mostly gas and water, and flow in the ocean; Touch you and Asia At the same moment; have a hand in the sunrises And the glow of this grass. I left the light precipitate of ashes to earth For a love-token. One mistake would be to see this poem as merely a prophecy of the future, even if it does aim to describe the future of any living reader. It is, more broadly, a cosmology and a personal apocalypse in the face of an immense creation that is also current, contemporary. In both Jeffers's and Merwin's poems, it is our arrogance that is revealed as tiny and irrelevant in the play of infinitely larger forces into which our individuality will one day dissolve, as many others have before us—as, perhaps, we almost could now, if we were just more aware and open. The holy spirit is here, but it is infused through and manifest in the entire creation, utterly dispersed and non-personifiable. It's worth observing as well that Jeffers seems more comfortable about this than Merwin does, at least in "For the Grave of Posterity," where personal annihilation means the void rather than reunion with nature, as it does in Jeffers, even if that reunion is an unconscious one. There are many, many other works from these two poets in the mode of living prophecy that we could place side by side to interesting effect, poems about war, poems that directly address the natural world, and so on. The way that both poets draw science, myth, and cosmology together is at times uncannily resonant. Think of Merwin's sonnet "That Music" from The River Sound (1999), with its evocation of the exploded geocentric myth of the music of the spheres and the primum mobile:
The force of this poem resides in its reiterated negations ("no" is repeated nine times, "not" another four) along with how it carries our attention so tenderly to the ephemeral things of this world—"the choiring of water…the saying / of a name…the thrush of dusk…the wren of morning"—which gain only that much more beauty in the absence of an absolutist myth of creation with its "ringing single note." This poem would make no sense—could not be meaningfully read—unless poised against the monistic creation myths which it denies. And yet, in the place of "that music," there is still…this music, the music of a holy ghost that animates an uncreated creation. Again, for those who know Jeffers well, it is hard, after reading "That Music," not to think of a poem like "Night," written in the mid-1920s, about the time of "Roan Stallion." The poem is a sustained meditation on the beauty of the natural world and its ultimate insignificance—indeed the insignificance of all things, including even distant stars—in the infinitude of space, or, more appropriately, eternal darkness, Merwin's "great absences." Jeffers's final stanza, with its attention to the death of unifying ideas, myths, and theologies, reads like a precursor of Merwin's poem:
In the same poem, not long before, in addressing "Night," the poet says "dear Night it is memory / Prophesies, prophecy that remembers, the charm of the dark." Both poets are cosmologists in whom memory and prophecy are joined as they find a path through the dark to a hard-earned praise of the creation-at least the inhuman parts of it, and occasionally even the people in it. Studies of influence in art are complex. Merwin's work is exceptionally rich and diverse, with hundreds if not thousands of literary ghosts lurking in the wings, as is the case with all strong poets. Jeffers is just one of them. Still, the continuities between the two poets' lives and work suggest they both participate in a loosely bound tradition, which I find hard to resist calling—with a nod to another great dissenting writer—"prophecy of the present." In much of their work, both Jeffers and Merwin contemplate what Jeffers, in his Preface to The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948), called "the transhuman magnificence" and seek to turn us away from our (corrupt) selves and towards that greater universe with awe. Man's place in this greater creation that has no creator is that of but one species on one planet, and our affairs are generally a mess, though love does remain possible. In the end, what draws these poets together most profoundly is the insistent way that each looks within himself and yet also brings us prophetic news of such a creation beyond ourselves: its beauty, its pain, its truth. And, for both of them, it is notable that this report emanates form a garden in the American West, both wild and domestic, where traditions are alive, but dissent is the rule. It is something of a cliché to talk about America's Calvinist theological roots. The ease of the allusion often obscures the details. Calvinism per se faded long ago and I have no desire to resuscitate it. One of its legacies, however, is a certain ecstatic, tortured prophetic strain in American poetry that is of great and lasting value. It is quite different from, say, Emerson's and Whitman's exuberances, or Robinson's and Frost's pragmatism, and we are fortunate to have its greatest living practitioner as our laureate. David J. Rothman is the Director of the Poetry Concentration with an Emphasis on Form in the new low-residency MFA program at Western State College of Colorado, and also teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. He is co-Founder of the Crested Butte Music Festival, Founding Editor and Publisher of Conundrum Press, and served for six years as Headmaster of Crested Butte Academy, an independent school in Colorado. He is President of the Robinson Jeffers Association and sits on a number of non-profit boards, including that of ALSCW. Rothman’s volumes of poetry include Dominion of Shadow, Beauty at Night and The Elephant’s Chiropractor, which was a Finalist for the Colorado Book Award. A new volume, Go Big, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Over the last 30 years his poems and essays have appeared in Appalachia, The Atlantic, The Formalist, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, The Journal, The Kenyon Review, Light, Measure, Poetry, The Threepenny Review and scores of other journals. He is co-author, with Stanley Rothman and Stephen Powers, of Hollywood’s America: Social and Political Themes in Motion Pictures. |