Description:
From 1920 until his death in 1962, consciousness and its effect on the natural world was Robinson Jeffers's obsession. Understanding and explaining the biological basis of mind is one of the towering challenges of modern science to this day, and Jeffers's poetic experiment is an important contribution to American literary history--no other twentieth-century poet attempted such a thorough engagement with a crucial scientific problem. Jeffers invented a sacramental poetics that accommodates a modern scientific account of consciousness, thereby integrating an essentially religious sensibility with science in order to discover the sacramentality of natural process and reveal a divine cosmos.
There is no other study of Jeffers or sacramental nature poetry like this one. It proposes that Jeffers's sacramentalism emerged out of his scientifically informed understanding of material nature. Drawing on ecocriticism, religious studies, and neuroscience, Inventing the Languageto Tell It shows how Jeffers produced the most compelling sacramental nature poetry of the twentieth century.
Brief description: George Hart is Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. He edited, with Scott Slovic, Exploring Social Issues through Literature: Literature and the Environment.
Review Quotes: "Inventing the Language to Tell It promises to open up significant new territory in the study of one of the most important and misunderstood twentieth-century American poets and in the rapidly developing field of ecocriticism. George Hart minces no words in diving right into the complicated and fascinating problem of Jeffers's push-pull relationship with "materialism and mysticism," finding that the author's literary strategies enable him to develop a "sacramental poetics" that accommodates these two, seemingly incompatible impulses."-----Scott Slovic, University of Idaho and editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment