8 - Jeffers, Snyder, and the ended world

Summary

In the middle of a difficult war, a poet recently married surveys a California hillside and dreams of building a house. The act once begun produces, in his wife's words, “a kind of awakening.” Peripatetic in mind and body, the poet now confirms the pleasures of manual labor and enjoys the disciplines of settlement. He begins to lead a new life and to write in a new measure. The poet feels that he has come to his “inevitable place.”

Robinson Jeffers in 1916; Gary Snyder in 1968. The two poets who have had the most to say about California landscape both ground their vision in the building of a house. Jeffers's Tor House became the work of many years; Snyder's Kitkitdizze still grows. One poet chose the wind and cold light of the Carmel headlands; the other, the hot, pine-studded foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Jeffers built a tower for his Una, won in 1913 after a six-year quest; Snyder built a sauna with his Masa, brought from Japan after a wedding on the lip of an active volcano. To each couple two sons were born. Both men chose unlevel ground where little would easily grow. Both chose granite, though Snyder's is mostly decomposed.

Locality: This is the dimension that binds. What divides these men–and this will be my argument–is their stance toward their moment in time. Snyder chooses his place with a commitment to his historical moment that Jeffers made in his life but avoided in his work. As an imagined place, Jeffers's California points beyond itself toward a network of timeless and even apocalyptic significance.