Robinson Jeffers and The End of the American Frontier

My autism has me trying to learn everything I can about an obscure poet Robinson Jeffers. I first heard of Jeffers from a speech done on him by Jonathan Bowden. If you’ve never heard this speech before, I encourage you to listen to it. It’s one of my favorite Jonathan Bowden speeches. What attracted me to the thought of Robinson Jeffers is Bowden’s assertion that he represented a DIFFERENT AMERICA. This America retained its ethnic heritage, it did not want to be an empire, and it possessed a keen understanding of what they had accomplished as well as what lay ahead.

Jeffers belonged to the Scots-Irish, America’s martial mountain people. The end of the Civil War sent many in the south west to escape the long arm of the government. Many Scots-Irish settled in Northern California. Jeffers perhaps, was the first generation of men to grow up in an America where the frontier was closed. Jeffers himself built his own house on the Californian coast just north of Big Sur. I visited this house in 2021 and it was powerful to see. To also explore the lands Jefferson must have roamed was also an experience I highly recommend.

You can imagine what a man like Robinson Jeffers must have felt looking out into the Pacific Ocean. His father, his grandfather, must have made their way west, experiencing the frontier. The uncivilized wildness of nature. And there he was at the edge of the continent. You can see the pessimism he must have had in his poetry. He saw there on the coast Oswald Spengler’s Decline. Now remember, this was in the early 1900s.

Robinson Jeffers is an obscure poet today because of World War II. The Roosevelt regime pushed hard to get the United States into the war and Jeffers was part of a group of forgotten Americans who didn’t think America should have been involved. His name was dragged through the mud for this stance(on top of him being anti-Christian) on the war. I didn’t get the impression he was atheist, rather as Bowden quotes in his speech, “I rejected the Christ at fifteen.” He believed in the divinity of God, he was very much influenced by his Calvinist upbringing. He just wasn’t Christian.

Why do I think this obscure poet is important?

It could be that I relate to him, sharing the same Scots-Irish heritage or maybe it’s that we’re both Californians. California gets a bad rap in the mainstream and it is well deserved, but there is a radical element here that gets no attention. To be honest with you, I don’t really read poetry. It intimidates a knuckledragger such as myself. I’m slowing making my way through Jeffers poetry because I’m a fan of his worldview. We live in an age that could be described as “humanist.” Jeffers called his philosophy anti-humanism.

Leftism you can say is an attempt to create a heaven on earth. Leftists very much hold a Christian morality and worldview without the belief. This attempt at making heaven on earth is already turning out to be an utter disaster and refutation of nature that God likely will never forgive. Jeffers was a man who grew up in a virginal California and throughout his life, he watched that wildness, that frontier, vanish. He saw and understood the importance the freedom of the wild had on Americans. What it meant to live in the wild and explore the frontier. And he was very cynical about being at the end of the American frontier.

Jeffers believed human nature never changed. He had a very much PRIMITIVE view of the world. He used powerful symbolism in his poetry. His favorite symbols were the stallion, the eagle, the hawk, and stone. While he was against the Second World War, he was hardly anti-war in his poetry. He even tried hard to get into the First World War. Jeffers himself was a genius, he spoke many different languages and was let into university at the age of fifteen. What I think makes Jeffers important and worthy of study however, is his analysis of western man.

Western man’s greatness — Jeffers says — is the innate religious turmoil in his mind. You see, mankind has had an unknown number of centuries where it was molded by what Jeffers called the Pagan virtues. Virtues such as justice, vengeance, pride, personal honor, Nietzsche’s Will to Power, and the “patriotic readiness to meet force with force.” These Pagan virtues have been in conflict with the last two thousand years of Christianity conversion and its values of non-resistance, piety, love and equality of all mankind. This turmoil and discordance made it impossible for western man to be at peace within himself and since he couldn’t find that peace, he looked to impose his will outward. Since he couldn’t solve the discordance in his mind, he sought to solve the discordance of the world. This is perhaps the best explanation I’ve found on the phenomenon of western man.

If you really read what he says about western man and religion, you realize there is something even deeper going on his thought. I don’t know his work enough to know if he knew it himself. His observation on western man shows the path out of the hell we’ve found ourselves in. There is a saying “everything in moderation.” I bring it up here because we’ve taken Christian metaphysics to the extreme where the Pagan virtues — which made the perfect compliment to Christianity— are beginning to fade out of society. We’re trying to make a heaven here on earth where no one gets their feelings hurt and no one has to die. It’s a full court effort to liberate mankind from nature.

It would be easy let this talk about Christianity and Pagansism devolve into another wretched debate over which is better, but I urge to look deep into what Jeffers has to say about western man.

The Warrior Religion believes in the Way of the Fathers. You have ancestors that were Christian as well as Pagan. To push aside both religions for a moment, Jeffers’ Pagan virtues are really just virtues of survival. It’s possible they’re OLDER than Paganism itself. Primitive man figured out how to survive the wildness in nature and he passed on those virtues, what I call the Way of the Fathers, down to his sons. These virtues helped primitive tribes survive. It helped them master space and eventually, got mankind to the top of the food chain.

Hidden in Jeffers’ observation of western man is the way out of this leftist hell. That religious discordance creates men of power, but the conversion into Christian metaphysics has been taken too far. In a way, you have to do what Christianity did, but in reverse. If what characterized western man was his natural Pagan virtues trying to reconcile his Christian conversion, you must then impose Pagan conversion onto the Christian virtues, but aim for a mid-ground where they’re always opposed. Now if you as a Christian are offended by the idea of Pagan conversion, think of it as a kind of Primitive conversion. A return to the virtues that helped man survive when he was still in the wild. Those virtues are just as relevant today as they were in the past, but today you have a CHOICE in whether you adhere to them.

You must become master of the Way of the Fathers. Your people clannish and ruthless. The martial aspect drilled into your men. Have open eyes to the technological weaponry that can win you the war and get you back into the frontier. The fight for survival is the matter of all men.