As Europe succumbs to conflagration in 1940, Kenneth Rexroth, on the California coast, finds himself writing
… this poem
Of the phoenix and the tortoise—
Of what survives and what perishes,
And how, of the fall of history
And waste of fact—on the crumbling
Edge of a ruined polity
That washes away in an ocean
Whose shores are all washing into death.
Even as the sea subsides “To a massive, uneasy torpor,” the “Fragments of its inexhaustible / Life litter the shingle, sea hares, / Broken starfish.” Rexroth imagines the corpse of a Japanese sailor “bumping / In a snarl of kelp in a tidepool”;
And, out of his drained grey flesh, he
Watches me with open hard eyes
Like small indestructible animals—
Me—who stand here on the edge of death,
Seeking the continuity,
The germ plasm, of history,
The epic’s lyric absolute.
The emblematic features of Rexroth’s poem, the phoenix and the tortoise, are versions of history. In the dystopic vision the State is “the organization / Of the evil instincts of mankind”; “Its goal is the achievement / Of the completely atomic / Individual and the pure / Commodity relationship— / The windowless monad sustained / By Providence.” In the perpetuum mobile of administered ecstasy, “The assumption of history / Is that the primary vehicle / Of social memory is the State,” obscuring the broader perspective of a living cosmos,
The vast onion of the actual:
The universe, the galaxy,
the solar system, and the earth,
And life, and human life, and men’s
Relationships, and men, and each man …
History seeping from capsule
To capsule, from periphery
To center, and outward again …
The sparkling quanta of events,
The pulsing wave motion of value … (Rexroth’s ellipses)
Fronting calamity on the Pacific rim, Rexroth, like Jeffers a few years earlier, turns to Epicurean atomism to account for the unaccountable marvel of such pulsation.
Endurance, novelty, and simple
Occurrence—and here I am, a node
In a context of disasters,
Still struggling with the old question,
Often and elaborately begged.
The atoms of Lucretius still,
Falling, inexplicably swerve.
And the generation that purposed
To control history vanishes
In its own apotheosis
Of calamity, unable
To explain why anything
Should happen at all.
One more Spring, and after the bees go,
The soft moths stagger in the firelight;
And silent, vertiginous, sliding,
The great owls hunt low in the air;
And the dwarf owls speak at their burrows.
We walk under setting Orion,
Once more in the dim boom of the sea …
Rexroth, like Lucretius, finds that “the thing that falls away is myself.” The fall is the unfolding—making explicit an implicated universe—of Democritus’s shower of atoms, to which Lucretius adds clinamen atomorum, the “gentle bias,” Coleridge calls it. The clinamen is the skip of the needle, the bump of the table that tumbles the card house, the incalculable diversion, detour (like Duchamp’s “delay in glass”—its shattered accidence preserved), deviation like that which style brings to a text.
Wallace Stevens’s style seems too consistently sonorous to suggest in itself a swerve, but as “gentle bias” it does seem so inclined. Stevens may not have been an enthusiast of Lucretius, but George Santayana’s Three Philosophical Poets (1910) would have at least placed the Roman poet in the immediate proximity of Dante and Goethe for him, a supreme altitude for the Connecticut poet to contemplate as he approached his own tropic suasions in Harmonium and “The Comedian as the Letter C.” It is Santayana who tellingly asks, “Are poets, at heart, in search of a philosophy? Or is philosophy, in the end, nothing but poetry?” (Three Philosophical Poets, 8). Stevens ponders “the pensive man” as a “Connoisseur of Chaos.” Because “The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,” there is a dissymmetry, a split of the sort that produces those matching halves we know as symbols. But importantly for Stevens, the symbol is not in the conventional sense a thing standing for another thing, but a record of mutilation, fracture, multiplicity. The fear of the pensive man is that “one more truth” is just “one more / Element in the immense disorder of truths” (“a plentiful waste and / waste of plenty” in A. R. Ammons’s definition of poetry). The Lucretian proposition with which the poem begins, however, evokes in the very symmetry so alluring to Stevens the necessary result:
A. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)
Order and disorder are an interplay of perceptions. The important thing is the give, the play in the system and its motion of admonition.
There is an exquisite movement, like it were chaos,
but of a sweet proportion
& order:
the atoms, cells & parsley-ferns
of the universe.
~
prosper
O
cell
through there where the forest is thickest
We find—“beckoned by pungencies”—that the air and even solid bodies “are nothing / but an immense swarm of / imperceptible / Animals”—
Without dimension; where length, breadth,
time, and place, are lost;
Eternal
embryon atoms
as the sands
warring winds, and poise
adhere
a moment:
Chance governs all.
Peter O’Leary calls Ronald Johnson “the American Lucretius, writing a longer epic poem that really doesn’t have a hero” (“Interview with Ronald Johnson,” 45). In fact, the catalog of American poetry pledged to some version of De Rerum natura is copious and diverse. Newton Arvin offers the attractive parallel that Emerson was to Whitman what Epicurus was to Lucretius (Whitman, 90). The Lucretian epicureanism of Whitman seems a plausible source for the fully manifest Leaves of Grass of 1855, prior to which he wrote undistinguished verse in the idiom of his day. As immediate foreground, Whitman had in fact been patiently transcribing into his notebooks (seedbeds for his new poetry) a thematized summary of the Reverend J. S. Watson’s translation of De Rerum natura published in 1851 (Gay Wilson Allen, Solitary Singer, 139). The catalog rhetoric so conspicuous in Whitman is comparably profuse in the Roman poet. But the single most decisive gift of Lucretius to Whitman, and to the ongoing legacy of composting poetry, is his vision of human life fully absorbed into the atomic fabric of the cosmos, a scene of propagations and admixtures inclusive of all creaturely life, but enfolding it in a plenitude far exceeding the bounds of sentience.
Time was we were molten, time was we were vapor.
What set us on fire and what set us revolving
Lucretius the Epicurean might tell us
This is Frost in “Too Anxious for Rivers.” The lines might have been by Jeffers; but Frost too went west with his Lucretius. Asked what book he’d take to a desert island, Frost replied, “Well, once I came out to Monrovia, California, and I brought along a single book you could never guess. It was a book of Lucretius’ poems [sic] in Latin” (Mertins, 258–59).* What Frost retains from De Rerum natura is not the Whitmanian catalog of metamorphoses and interpenetrating life cycles, but the sense of nature as trickster, like the buck (“the embodiment that crashed / In the cliff’s talus”) that appears peremptorily in answer to the lament of solipsism in “The Most of It”:
He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
Like many places in Frost, this is a rehearsal of the Emersonian doctrine of compensation. But Emerson is himself Lucretian in his conviction that “the doctrine of compensation is not the doctrine of indifferency” because, for him as for his Roman predecessor, “The soul is not a compensation, but a life. The soul is” (“Compensation”).
“West-Running Brook” celebrates the nuptials of a human couple with a brook, including an interlude, a choral hymn of generation and entropy.
‘Speaking of contraries, see how the brook
In that white wave runs counter to itself.
It is from that in water we were from
Long, long before we were from any creature.
Here we, in our impatience of the steps,
Get back to the beginning of beginnings,
The stream of everything that runs away.
… runs away
To fill the abyss’ void with emptiness.
It flows beside us in this water brook,
But it flows over us. It flows between us
To separate us for a panic moment.
It flows between us, over us, and with us.
And it is time, strength, tone, light, life, and love—
And even substance lapsing unsubstantial;
The universal cataract of death
That spends to nothingness—and unresisted,
Save by some strange resistance in itself,
Not just a swerving, but a throwing back,
As if regret were in it and were sacred.
“It is from this in nature we are from. / It is most us,” Frost’s speaker affirms of “this backward motion toward the source.” The swerve. Lucretius’s clinamen atomorum, “the blows of the atoms,” Louis Zukofsky summarizes, “the lag and prophecy of Lucretius’ art which attempts to prove the unseen atoms so often by seen things” (Bottom, 86). “O Nature, and O soul of man!” Ishmael wails in Moby-Dick, “how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind” (chap. 70).
Asked by a Tufts student about his philosophy, Robinson Jeffers responded diffidently, “Perhaps a gleam from Lucretius on one side and Wordsworth on the other” (Selected Letters, 201). But it is mainly the Lucretian posture Jeffers assumes; one in which the turbulent motion, driven into fecund issue by the clinamen—the involuntary if ever so slight swerve of an atom—is supreme. It is a vision of a fully composting cosmos, everything and all manner of things freely exchanged in the cauldron of material destiny*—and at his most pantheistically enthused,
Jeffers celebrates a “Divinely superfluous beauty”—its superfluity running over the attentions of humans, outrunning them, and persisting even beyond their (our) eventual demise. In his final vision of “The unformed volcanic earth, a female thing” (Jeffers’s title a reminder that De Rerum natura was dedicated to Venus), he finds Lucretius exemplary:
And the passionate human intelligence
Straining its limits, striving to understand itself and the universe to the last galaxy—
Flammantia moenia mundi, Lucretius wrote,
Alliterating like a Saxon—all those Ms mean majesty—
The flaming world-walls, far-flung fortifications of being
Against not-being.
Jeffers is a man who “feel[s] the flesh of the mountain move on its bones in the wet darkness” and is moved then to wonder “Is this more beautiful / Than man’s disasters?”
Jeffers dichotomizes the world as human and nonhuman, and his scene of reckoning is invariably “this fate going on / Outside our fates.” In human frame, new Jerusalems arise, but “this rock will be here … the energies / That are its atoms will still be bearing the whole mountain above : and I many packed centuries ago / Felt its intense reality with love and wonder.” “The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heart-breaking beauty / Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.” This is his “Credo.”
As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
The “inhumanism” that scandalized Jeffers’s Random House editors and the reviewers of The Double Axe in 1948 (albeit less volatile than the fiasco of the Library of Congress’s Bollingen award to The Pisan Cantos the same year*) now seems surprisingly sound, so the controversy illuminates the degree of paranoia in the American historical imagination at the onset of the Cold War. Poets like Pound had been saying nasty things about politicians all along, so it couldn’t entirely have been Jeffers’ routine slander of militarism that made his publisher nervous. The offense was in putting the species in its place, “a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence” (Double Axe, xxi). “It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does,” he adds, “rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person.”
Watching killer whales prey on sea lions, Jeffers finds that “Here was death, and with terror, yet it looked clean and bright, it was beautiful.” Its beauty is frankly affirmed as a quality of being exempt from human meddling.
… The earth is a star, its human element
Is what darkens it. War is evil, the peace will be evil, cruelty is evil; death is not evil. But the breed of man
Has been queer from the start. It looks like a botched experiment that has run wild and ought to be stopped.
“The Answer” (a characteristic title) is “To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence” but to take consolation in the knowledge that “however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand / Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history … / Often appears atrociously ugly.” So “It is good for man … / To know that his needs and nature are no more changed in fact in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles.”
But Jeffers does have a story to tell, a tale of degeneration and disinheritance; of a “wound … in the brain” that “has never healed” where men “learned trembling religion and blood-sacrifice … / And hate the world.” To hate the haters was Jeffers’s personal fate. Reinforced by the spartan clifftop loneliness following wife Una’s death, he lost all patience with humanity. “Lucretius felt the change of the world in his time,” he writes in “Prescription of Painful Ends,” yet
… one builds poems for treasuries, time-conscious poems : Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and wise conduct; Plato smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.
By contrast, our own epoch with its “acids for honey” leaves so little hope in Jeffers’s wish for a fully intricated human/nature, that
… one christens each poem, in dutiful
Hope of burning off at least the top layer of the time’s uncleanness, from the acid-bottles.
It’s surprising that no one has thought of pairing Jeffers and Pound, each “furious from perception” (Pound’s tag for Hitler), dwellers on western coasts (Big Sur and Rapallo) where their visions thrived in monomania.* Surprising because Pound’s blockbuster docudrama history Cantos of the 1930s are as deeply moralized and openly declared as Jeffers’s “little chirping Sirens, alcohol, amusement, opiates” who are “another sign that the age needs renewal.” Both men demanded renewal : their poems are like fists pounding the city gates; and they come on with a mean disposition. Crawlin’ king snake men.
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
The Poundian counterparts range throughout the Cantos. Here are a few:
The saccharescent, lying in glucose,
the pompous in cotton wool
with a stench like the fats at Grasse,
the great scabrous arse-hole, shitting flies,
rumbling with imperialism,
ultimate urinal, middan, pisswallow without a cloaca
~
England off there in black darkness,
Russia off there in black darkness,
The last crumbs of civilization …
Pound’s epic begins with the invocation preceding an infernal descent, a catabasis or nekyia. Descent to Hades, where the ghosts swarm (summoned lipsmacking to spilled ram’s gore in Homer). The rugged Big Sur coastal setting, blessed with Mediterranean weather suited to the literary disposition of someone trained in classics, was the unchanging scene for Jeffers’s longer narrative poems as well as the lyrics. But the American shoreline was “Haunted Country” distinct from Pound’s Ligurian coast : “Here the human past is dim and feeble and alien to us / Our ghosts draw from the crowded future.”