Over the course of this project, I examined the way in which Robinson Jeffers approached the intersecting, and often problematic, themes of nature, religion, and humanity through his poetry, prose, and life. I approached this research with the following questions as guides: How does Jeffers attempt to reconcile the social construction or belief in the Creating Divine with his own feelings of inhumanism? Does the story of Jeffers’s personal life reflect the ideas he constructs in his writing? What role does the ecology of Jeffers play in the contemporary world of growing environment awareness and concern?
As I moved forth in my study, the reputation of Jeffers as an isolated, somewhat misanthropic poet began to break down. Though he is often overlooked in the canon of modern poetry, Jeffers’s voice is one that echoes into the contemporary consciousness as he laments the anthropocentricism of humanity against the sublime landscape and fauna of the American West. That being said, his poems are gradually gaining attention as scholarship on Dark Green Religion and Ecology emerges in environmental and religious studies programs across the country.
I believe, for contemporary readers as well as Jeffers’s own contemporaries, that his self-proclaimed inhumanism is an isolating issue. One must study his poetry, his prose, his life to fully grasp an understanding of what he means in his desire to access the “transhuman.” In a world in which the rhetoric of humanitarianism is a device of unification, Jeffers’s challenges to this can initially seem very threatening. However, Jeffers’ goal lies not in a desire to see the extinction of humanity or an increase in suspicious, misanthropic attitudes. Rather, he challenges readers to see beyond the human element–to grasp the rhapsodic pantheism of the “wild God of the world” (Hurt Hawks).