Robinson Jeffers

But I was pleasantly surprised to see a quote from a poet that I'm familiar with.

His name is Robinson Jeffers.

And I'm going to read a couple of poems before we get started.

We're going to have like a free form FM radio transmission today.

So many different series and things like that I've read.

Posted like the 30-part series on the Nazis and all these other series.

But he always quoted this one line of Robinson Jeffers.

And it was the cold passion for truth hunts a no pack.

It was rewritten by Jean-Paul Sartre in our day, where it is called The Flies.

It was rewritten by Robinson Jeffers, also in our day, where it was called The Tower Beyond Tragedy, and rewritten by a number of other dramatists.

What are they doing? Have they no other subjects? Why do they pick the subject of Orestes? Well, they do it because Orestes says something about what is going on in each one of us.

You and I, when we are in adolescence, uh, do not kill our mothers as Orestes did, but we must kill the tie of embeddedness to them.

The reason I'm going to bring this up, and it's only going to take me about 40 seconds, this is The Way of the World in 40 Seconds.

It was a poem entitled Be Angry at the Sun by Robinson Jeffers in 1941.

There's a background to that we can't get into right now, but he was a man that was saddened at the fact that two of his favorite countries, the United States and Japan, were going to go at it.

And this is what he wrote.

Yours is not theirs.

Holy mackerel.

So yes, that line about the cult passion for truth, hunts and no pacts, that they have used and you remember is from Robinson Jeffers' poem, Conforti One.

Yeah, that's a great one.

The compass plant and wild petunia are only two of hundreds of wildflower and grass species that can be outcompeted by the dominant tall grasses.

But, as Robinson Jeffers puts it in his poem, Bixby's Landing, 1928, What a good multitude is here in return.

In the process of reorganization, exchange in other ecological currencies multiplies, for countless organisms dwell in the palace of wildflowers.

Most herbivores and omnivores are smaller than a bison and lack the microbial symbiosis that provides access to grass.

We hope you enjoy today's offering for Poem a Day, unarchived from the public domain and presented by the Academy of American Poets.

People and a Heron by Robinson Jeffers A desert of weed and water darkened stone under my western windows.

The ebb lasted all afternoon, and many pieces of humanity, men, women, and children, gatherings shellfish, swarmed with voices of gulls the sea breached.

At twilight they went off together, the verge was left vacant, an evening heron bent broad wings over the black ebb, and left me wondering why a lone bird was dearer to me than many people.

Well, rare is dear, but also, I suppose, well reconciled with the world, but not with our own natures we grudge to see them reflected on the world for a mere.

About this poem.

People and a Heron was collected in Robinson Jeffers, Roan Stallion, Tamar, and other poems.

About the collection, Robert Brophy, a professor of English at California State University, Long Beach, and a founding member of the Robinson Jeffers Association, writes in his book, Robinson Jeffers, Dimensions of a Poet, By the time of Roan Stallion, the view of nature Jeffers had derived at least partly from his engagement with science had become fundamental, both thematically and formally, to his narrative work.