“When I heard ‘Pittsburgh’ I have always thought of smoke, dirt, chimneys, steel … but of late it has become glorified, because it is the birthplace of America’s greatest tragic poet, and one of the greatest poets of any time,” an article in the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph declared in 1928.
The author was referring to Robinson Jeffers, who was born in 1887 in Allegheny City, now the North Side. The writer claimed that someday Jeffers would be as “indissolubly linked” with Pittsburgh as Edgar Allan Poe is with Baltimore.
Sadly, he isn’t. He left the area with his family in 1903, eventually settling in Carmel on the Pacific Coast, and there, not here, became one of America’s great poets.
Jeffers would have thought an exhibition about himself at the Heinz History Center to be ridiculous, but the mysteries of creativity are endless, and it is worth asking how southwestern Pennsylvania contributed to his poetry.
The permanent things
Jeffers was the son of a Presbyterian minister and Biblical scholar, so it is hard not to see Jeffers’s poems as sermons, or the resurrected voice of Hebrew prophecy and Greek tragedy.
As he wrote in one poem, a poem needs “permanent things,” things “continually renewed or always present./ Grass that is made each year equals the mountains in her past and future;/ Fashionable and momentary things we need not see nor speak of.”
When the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph published its praise of Jeffers in 1928, he himself was that fashionable and momentary thing. He’d made a splash with a self-published book of poems in 1924, and the next year the New York publisher Boni and Liveright released an expanded edition, “Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems.”
From then until his death in 1962, Jeffers published hundreds of short poems and many longer, narrative poems. He recast stories from Greek tragedy and the Hebrew Bible in the rugged California landscape he knew best.
Usually described as an “environmental poet,” though more than that, he continually pitted the transience of human life against the longevity of the natural world that he preferred. As he said in one poem, scanning shore and ocean and headland: “Before the first man/ Here were the stones, the ocean, the cypresses.”
The huge breadth of history and the slow permanence of nature interested him more than human life and our contemporary concerns, what he called “the inquisitive animal’s/ Amusements.” This philosophy extended so far that he could simply state that “civilization is a transient sickness.”
We can understand again why there isn’t a Robinson Jeffers Day in Pittsburgh. But then there is a late poem, “Vulture,” which articulates the same preference but in a glorious and unforgettable way.
Imagining a circling vulture picking away at his own corpse, he writes, “To be eaten by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes/ What a sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment; what a life after death.”
His time in the woods
Jeffers was born in 1887 at the Western Theological Seminary on Ridge Avenue (now the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary on Highland Avenue). His father moved the family to a house on Thorn Street in Sewickley less than two years later.
At the beginning and end of the 1890s, his parents enrolled him in boarding schools in Switzerland and Germany. When at home, he continued to be taught by his father and attended the Allegheny Park Institute and the Pittsburgh Academy.
It is in between those years of boarding schools, however, that we can locate what might be called the permanent part of Jeffers in the area.
His father made the move to Sewickley to deter visitors and distractions at the seminary, but when interruptions became unbearable at the new house, in 1893 he moved the family to an estate about a mile away in Edgeworth, called Twin Hollows.
When asked in 1928 what his early and important influences were, which most poets would answer with the names of other poets, Jeffers wrote simply, “Freedom to ramble the countryside” there.
In place of friends, Jeffers became fluent in Latin, Greek, French and German. He wrote of his education: “My father was a clergyman but also intelligent, and he brought me up to timely ideas about origin of species, descent of man, astronomy, geology, etc.”
His memories of boarding school were of the natural world, not of any teachers or the curriculum — “lakes to swim in, mountains to ramble over, perfectly alone.” One can imagine him combining all of this, and strengthening an already stubborn and isolated temperament, among the trees and the birds and natural life at Twin Hollows.
Nature was his greatest teacher. Even a knowledge of history and religion, and of other poets, were only a means to articulating humanity’s struggle to realize that (as he believed) human beings are far from the most important things. As he wrote in a poem titled “Credo,” “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.”
At a time when poetry is increasingly written only to be read by other poets, and when poetry itself is becoming a merely academic concern, the plain-spoken and straightforward style of Jeffers’s own verse is something anyone can reach for.
Poetry alive everywhere
Whereas literary Modernism reveled in obscurity and difficulty, Jeffers learned from Homer and Isaiah and Milton the power of heightened everyday language put to the use of natural description, character, and narrative. As Walt Whitman once remarked, “It makes such difference where you read” — and indeed Jeffers can come alive anywhere, not just the classroom. His poetry seems to demand as much.
What would it mean for any of us to suddenly come upon these lines while simply walking or driving through the city?
Again imagining his afterlife, Jeffers soars: “But all the rest is heightened, widened, set free./ I admired the beauty/ While I was human, now I am part of the beauty./ I wander in the air,/ Being mostly gas and water, and flow in the ocean;/ Touch you and Asia/ At the same moment; have a hand in the sunrises/ And the glow of this grass.”
Tim Miller is a poet living in Shaler and author of a collection of essays, “Notes from the Grid.” He is online at wordandsilence.com.
First Published: September 22, 2024, 9:30 a.m.