John Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)Poète américain et dramaturge. De 1914 jusqu'à sa mort, il habita Big Sur, une région rocheuse de la Côte californienne, trouvant son inspiration dans sa rude beauté. Pour Jeffers, le monde, vu sous l'angle panthésiste, était souillé seulement par l'homme, un animal contrarié et condamné. Il utilisa fréquemment le Vieux Testament, la légende du Christ, ainsi que les mythes grecs afin d'illustrer l'esprit torturé de l'humanité, son instrospection maladive, les absurdités de la vie moderne, et son aliénation de la nature. La poésie de Jeffers est intense et virile, riche en puissance élémentaire.
Né à Pittsburgh (Pennsylvanie) le 10 janvier 1887. Son père, un professeur de littérature biblique et testimentaire au Western Theology Seminary à Pittsburgh, supervisa l'éducation du jeune Jeffers. C'est ainsi que ce dernier commença à apprendre le grec à l'âge de 5 ans. Le latin et la doctrine presbytérienne suivirent. Ses premières leçons furent rapidement succédées de voyages en Europe, où il étudia dans des écoles de Zurich, Leipzig, et Genève. Quand sa famille déménagea en Californie, Jeffers, à l'âge de 16 ans, entra au Occidental College. Il y gradua en 1905, à l'âge de 18 ans.
En 1903, la famille quitta Pittsbugh pour les paysages ensoleillés de Pasadena, en raison de la santé défaillante du père de Jeffers. Le jeune Jeffers fit ses études de littérature à l'Université de Californie du Sud (USC), où il fit la connaissance d'Una Call Kuster, qui devait devenir plus tard son épouse. En 1906, il retournait en Suisse pour y étudier le vieil anglais, la philosophie, l'histoire littéraire française, Dante, la poésie romantique espagnole, et l'histoire de l'empire romain. Toutefois, il revint au USC en septembre 1907, où il fut admis à l'école de médecine. En 1910, n'ayant pas complété ses études de médecine, Jeffers entra à l'Université de Washington à Seattle pendant un an pour y étudier la foresterie.
Jeffers se maria le 2 août 1913 avec Una Call Kuster, la journée même où elle obtint le divorce de son précédent mari. Ils déménagèrent à Carmel (Californie), et en 1916, ils eurent des garçons jumeaux, Donnan et Garth. En 1919 Jeffers commença la construction d'un cottage (le « Tor House ») surplombant la baie de Carmel, en face du Point Lobos, ainsi que d'une tour haute de 40 pieds (« Hawk Tower »). À l'exception de quelques voyages en Europe et au Nouveau Mexique, le couple demeura à Carmel toute leur vie.
Après un voyage à Londres en 1928, Jeffers s'isola de plus en plus. Néanmoins, les décennies 1920 et 1930 furent parmi les plus productives et sa réputation connut le zénith durant cette période. Toutefois, à la fin des années 1930 et 1940, les critiques jugèrent que le talent de Jeffers s'était évanoui ; on se questionna sur son patriotisme à cause des références à l'actualité et aux figures politiques du moment (par exemple, Pearl Harbor, Teheran, Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt). Ce qui n'empêcha pas son adaptation de la Médée d'Euripide de connaître un grand succès lors de sa production à New York en 1947.
Malheureusement, peu temps après, son épouse Una tomba malade et mourut du cancer en 1950.
À sa mort, Jeffers avait perdu la majeure partie de ses lecteurs, et en moins de vinght ans, ses oeuvres disparurent des anthologies et des salles de classe, alors même que ses ouvrages étaient traduits en Europe, notamment dans les pays de l'Est. Cependant, à la fin des années 1980, plusieurs projets d'étude portant sur l'oeuvre de Jeffers ainsi que la révision du canon littéraire américain réétablit Jeffers comme une figure importante de la littérature américaine et du modernisme. Comme Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, et Wallace Stevens, Jeffers chercha à redéfinir le rôle de la poésie dans le champ de l'expérience humaine et à identifier la relation authentique de l'expérience humaine au monde et à Dieu.
Jeffers a développé une vision du monde qui comprend la science et la théologie, croyant que l'humanité m'est qu'un moment transitoire dans la vaste histoire du cosmos. Ce n'est d'ailleurs pas une coïncidence si son frère, Hamilton, a travaillé pendant longtemps comme astronome au Lick Observatory, situé dans les environs de San Jose en Californie. Jeffers utilise souvent une imagerie astronomique pour mettre en scène la puissance et l'immensité de l'univers. Le premier poème de Jeffers, « The Measure », publié en décembre 1903 dans l'Aurora, un minuscule magazine littéraire universitaire, annonce, avec son imagerie basée sur les vastes nébuleuses et les vides galactiques, toute son oeuvre ultérieure avec sa poésie cosmique, inhumaine, où l'homme n'occupe qu'une place accidentelle dans un univers infini et indifférent.
La poésie de Jeffers chante la « beauté des choses » du monde naturel mais aussi un désenchantement vis-à-vis l'homme. Il exprime dans sa poésie une vision misanthrope et pessimiste de l'humanité, celle-ci n'étant qu'une race manquée, chargée de défauts, séparée de la nature et possédeant un amour de la cruauté qui lui est particulier.
Jeffers est mort à Carmel le 20 janvier 1962.
Tiré de : American National Biography. New York : Oxford University Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by the American Council of Learned Societies.
Perhaps you did not know how bright last night,
Especially above your seaside door,
Was all the marvelous starlit sky, and wore
White harmonies of very shining light.
Perhaps you did not want to seek the sight
Of that remembered rapture any more. --
But then at least you must have heard the shore
Roar with reverberant voices thro' the night.
Those stars were lit with longing of my own,
And the ocean's moan was full of my own pain.
Yet doubtless it was well for both of us
You did not come, but left me there alone.
I hardly ought to see you much again ;
And stars, we know, are often dangerous.Robinson Jeffers
Then what is the answer ? -- Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
and not wish for evil ; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know 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... for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
or drown in despair when his days darken.Robinson Jeffers
To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things--earth, stone and water,
Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars --
The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions,
And unhuman nature its towering reality --
For man's half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant -- to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.
The rest's diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,
The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.Robinson Jeffers
The Atlantic is a stormy moat ; and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood, and shines in the sun ; but here the Pacific --
Our ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, clash of faiths --
Is a speck of dust on the great scale-pan.
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland
plunging like dolphins through the blue sea-smoke
Into pale sea--look west at the hill of water : it is half the planet :
this dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antartica: those are the eyelids that never close ;
this is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth; and what it watches is not our wars.Robinson Jeffers
The universe expands and contracts like a great heart.
It is expanding, the farthest nebulae
Rush with the speed of light into empty space.
It will contract, the immense navies of stars and galaxies,
dust clouds and nebulae
Are recalled home, they crush against each other in one
harbor, they stick in one lump
And then explode it, nothing can hold them down ; there is no
way to express that explosion; all that exists
Roars into flame, the tortured fragments rush away from each
other into all the sky, new universes
Jewel the black breast of night ; and far off the outer nebulae
like charging spearmen again
Invade emptiness.
No wonder we are so fascinated with
fireworks
And our huge bombs : it is a kind of homesickness perhaps for
the howling fireblast that we were born from.
But the whole sum of the energies
That made and contain the giant atom survives. It will
gather again and pile up, the power and the glory --
And no doubt it will burst again; diastole and systole : the
whole universe beats like a heart.
Peace in our time was never one of God's promises ; but back
and forth, live and die, burn and be damned,
The great heart beating, pumping into our arteries His
terrible life.
He is beautiful beyond belief.
And we, God's apes -- or tragic children -- share in the beauty.
We see it above our torment, that's what life's for.
He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like Dante's
Florence, no anthropoid God
Making commandments, : this is the God who does not care
and will never cease. Look at the seas there
Flashing against this rock in the darkness --look at the
tide-stream stars -- and the fall of nations -- and dawn
Wandering with wet white feet down the Caramel Valley to
meet the sea. These are real and we see their beauty.
The great explosion is probably only a metaphor -- I know not
-- of faceless violence, the root of all things.Robinson Jeffers
According to the measure all is great
Or small, as man may wish. Old mother Earth,
Beside those things to which she giveth birth,
Seems huge and almost boundless. Situed
Amid the depths of space, where suns elate
In power of speed and glory, and the girth
Of glowing nebulae, like a giant's hearth,
Revolve, her greatness somewhat doth abate.
And those, her progeny, the mighty men,
Swaying her things in comradeship with Fate,
Seem but as worms upon a little clod.
So naught so great but that it may again
Be measured by a greater. Truly great
Alone are Space, Eternity and God.Robinson Jeffers, décembre 1903, dans The Aurora, 10(3)
Male-throated under the shallow sea-fog
Moaned a ship's horn quivering the shorelong granite.
Coyotes toward the valley made answer,
Their little wolf-pads in the dead grass by the stream
Wet with the young season's first rain,
Their jagged wail trespassing among the steep stars.
What stars? Aldebaran under the dove-leash
Pleiades. I thought, in an hour Orion will be risen,
Be glad for summer is dead and the sky
Turns over to darkness, good storms, few guests, glad rivers.Robinson Jeffers, 1926
not in a man's shape
He approves the praise, he [God] that walks lightning-naked on the
Pacific, that laces the suns with planets,
The heart of the atom with electrons : what is humanity in this
cosmos ? For him, the last
Least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution; for itself
the mold to break away from, the coal
To break into fire, the atom to be split.Robinson Jeffers
The polar ice-caps are melting, the mountain glaciers
Drip into rivers; all feed the ocean ;
Tides ebb and flow, but every year a little bit higher.
They will drown New York, they will drown London.
And this place, where I have planted tree and built a stone house,
Will be under sea. The poor trees will perish,
And little fish will flicker in and out the windows. I built it well,
Thick walls and Portland cement and gray granite,
The tower at least will hold against the sea's buffeting ; it will become
Geological, fossil and permanent.
What a pleasure it is to mix one's mind with geological
Time, or with astronomical relax it.
There is nothing like astronomy to pull the stuff out of man.
His stupid dreams and red-rooster importance : let him count the star-swirls.Robinson Jeffers
Références :
- Robinson Jeffers Association : https://robinsonjeffersassociation.org/
- Your Dictionary - Robinson Jeffers: https://biography.yourdictionary.com/john-robinson-jeffers
- Poetry Foundation - Robinson Jeffers : https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robinson-jeffers
- Academy of American Poets - Robinson Jeffers : https://poets.org/poet/robinson-jeffers
- Robinson Jeffers Poems : https://mypoeticside.com/poets/robinson-jeffers-poems
- Poem Hunter - Robinson Jeffers : https://www.poemhunter.com/robinson-jeffers/
- All Poetry - Robinson Jeffers : https://allpoetry.com/Robinson-Jeffers
- Famous Poets and Poems - Robinson Jeffers : http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/robinson_jeffers
- Robinson Jeffers : https://www.shigeku.org/xlib/lingshidao/waiwen/jeffers.htm
- Nature Pantheist - Robinson Jeffers : http://naturepantheist.org/jeffers.html
- World Pantheism - Robinson Jeffers : https://www.pantheism.net/paul/history/jeffers.htm
Bibliographie :
- Jeanetta Boswell, Robinson Jeffers and the Critics, 1912-1983 (1986)
- Robert Brophy, Robinson Jeffers : Dimensions of a Poet (1995)
- Robert Brophy, Robinson Jeffers : Myth, Ritual and Symbol in His Narrative Poems (1973)
- Robert Brophy (ed.), The Robinson Jeffers Newsletter : A Jubilee Gathering, 1962-1988 (1988)
- Frederic I. Carpenter, Robinson Jeffers (1962)
- Arthur B. Coffin, Robinson Jeffers : Poet of Inhumanism (1971)
- William Everson, The Excesses of God : Robinson Jeffers as a Religious Figure (1998)
- William Everson, Robinson Jeffers : Fragments of an Older Fury (1968)
- Colin Falck, Robinson Jeffers : American Romantic (1995)
- Bill Hotchkiss, Jeffers : The Sivaistic Vision (1975)
- James Karman (ed.), Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers (1990)
- James Karman, Robinson Jeffers : Poet of California (1987)
- James Karman, Robinson Jeffers (1995)
- William H. Nolte, The Merrill Checklist of Robinson Jeffers (1970)
- William H. Nolte, Rock and Hawk : Robinson Jeffers and the Romantic Agony (1978)
- L. C. Powell, Robinson Jeffers : The Man and His Work (1940; repr. 1973)
- Ward Ritchie, Jeffers : Some Recollections of Robinson Jeffers (1977)
- Radcliffe Squires, The Loyalties of Robinson Jeffers (1956)
- Alex A. Vardamis, The Critical Reputation of Robinson Jeffers : A Bibliographical Study (1972)
- Robert Zaller (ed.), Centennial Essays for Robinson Jeffers (1991)
- Robert Zaller, The Cliffs of Solitude : A Reading of Robinson Jeffers (1983)
Oeuvres poétiques :
- Flagons and Apples (1912)
- Californians (1916)
- Tamar and Other Poems (1924)
- Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems (1925)
- The Women at Point Sur (1927)
- Cawdor and Other Poems (1928)
- Dear Judas and Other Poem (1929)
- Thurso's Landing and Other Poems (1932)
- Give Your Heart to the Hawks and other Poems (1933)
- Solstice and Other Poems (1935)
- Such Counsels You Gave To me and Other Poems (1937)
- Be Angry at the Sun (1941)
- Medea (1946)
- The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948)
- Poetry, Gongorism and a Thousand Years (1949)
- Hungerfield and Other Poems (1954)
- Themes in My Poems (1956)
- The Beginning and the End and Other Poems (1963)
- Selected Poems (1965)
- The Alpine Christ and Other Poems (1974)
- "What Odd Expedients" and Other Poems (1981)
- Rock and Hawk : A Selection of Shorter Poems (1987)
- The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, edited by Tim Hunt (1988-89)
- The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, edited by Tim Hunt (2001)
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