Double Axe

"Robinson Jeffers was a poet who lived in California for most of his life. He’s a very interesting poet, unlike any other I have come across. I remember reading an anthology many years ago and coming across a couple of his poems. I’d never heard of him before but thought they were very striking for two reasons. First, they had a deep, radical ecological vision of the world. Second, the way they were written, with long, flowing lines – he’s not interested in meter, he’s interested in rhythm. His style is unlike anything else I’ve seen, as are his themes. Jeffers looks at the world, as one would now describe it, from a deep ecological perspective with humans as just one part of the ecological web, not at the centre of it. Yes, he writes about this in Double Axe. It’s probably this collection that destroyed his reputation. In the 1920s and 1930s he was writing romantic poems and was very fashionable, even appearing on the front cover of Time magazine. But as he got older, he became more and more critical of human civilisation and that became unfashionable in the America of the forties, fifties and sixties, which was progressive, looking to the future. He was also very critical in Double Axe of America entering World War II. This is the only volume of poetry I have ever read that has a publisher’s note in the beginning distancing them from the opinions of the author. That is primarily because he was anti-war, but it’s also because he was writing quite hard, dark poetry about the future of civilisation. We now come right back round to all the other stuff we have covered today – whether it’s Kaczynski, Ronald Wright or D. H. Lawrence – and this perspective of the almost inevitable movement of civilisations towards doom. Jeffers is probably the darkest writer of all of them. He looks at the human world from a hawk’s eye view. He’s up there, looking down and trying to distance himself from it. You get the impression from Jeffers that he is trying to do that because it’s the only way he can survive in the world without feeling too depressed about it, without feeling too much pain. He comes up with some incredible poetry. Not all of it is good – some of it is a bit didactic and self-indulgent. But when he gets it right, he writes some of the most incredible, outsiderish, radical poetry you have ever come across. It’s like throwing cold water over your face."