Robinson Jeffers
Robinson Jeffers
John Robinson Jefferswas an American poet, known for his work about the central California coast. Much of Jeffers' poetry was written in narrative and epic form, but he is also known for his shorter verse and is considered an icon of the environmental movement. Influential and highly regarded in some circles, despite or because of his philosophy of "inhumanism," Jeffers believed that transcending conflict required human concerns to be de-emphasized in favor of the boundless whole. This led him to...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth10 January 1887
CityPittsburgh, PA
CountryUnited States of America
Know that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful.
Meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.
I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason For fire and change and torture and the old returnings.
civilization is a transient sickness.
He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one's self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions - the world of the spirits.
The greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.
I've changed my ways a little, I cannot now Run with you in the evenings along the shore, Except in a kind of dream, and you, if you dream a moment, You see me there.
The tides are in our veins.
I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy... parts of one organic whole.... (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars; none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine.
The world's in a bad way, my man, And bound to be worse before it mends; Better lie up in the mountain here Four or five centuries, While the stars go over the lonely ocean.
It is only a little planet, but how beautiful it is.
Long live freedom and damn the ideologies.
Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.