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Jack Detroit 講師のコラム

Robinson Jeffers: Jack Detroit's favorite poet

今週のテーマ: 好きな詩人

2020年7月29日

America has had many important poets, such as Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and Maya Angelou. I had to study all of them for my English major. In fact, Whitman was my thesis subject for my graduate degree in English. However, my favorite American poet is someone not many people know. Robinson Jeffers (1887-1961) is one of the first poets to break the old rules of poetry and one of the most important environmentalists of the 21st century, but he is rarely taught in schools. And this is why I want to introduce you to Robinson Jeffers.
 
Jeffers was popular around the 1920s and 30s. Most of his poems used English in different, very visual, ways. He always had something important to say about the beauty of nature. Most of his poems were set on the coast of California, not far from my hometown San Francisco. And he also criticized human beings for being too selfish and not putting nature first. His poetry influenced modern environmentalism and even philosophy. 
 
In his personal life, Jeffers was involved in a scandal with a married woman. At the beginning of the 20th century, having an affair was sometimes illegal. But he and his lover Una eventually married and lived in Carmel, California. For the next 50 years they built a stone castle in Big Sur, called Tor House. You can visit it if you drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
 
Robinson Jeffers is my favorite poet because he used English language in ways which affect philosophy, politics, and how we appreciate nature. Here is a short poem:
 
Rock and Hawk
Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.
 
This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the seawind
Lets no tree grow,
 
Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.
 
I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,
 
But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;
 
Life with calm death; the falcon's 
Realist eyes and act
Married to the massive
 
Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud.
 
New Words:
poem/poet
thesis
environmentalism
philosophy
scandal
emblem
hawk
to perch

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