Astonied: the mineral poetics of Robinson Jeffers, Hugh MacDiarmid, Francis Ponge and Muriel Rukeyser. Issue 9 (1st September 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Murphet, Julian
• Is Part Of: Textual practice. Volume 34:Issue 9(2020)
• Page Start: 1501
• Page End: 1517
• Publication Date: 2020-09-01
• Subjects: Inhumanism -- modernism -- Robinson Jeffers -- Hugh MacDiarmid -- Francis Ponge -- Muriel Rekeyser -- deep time; Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals; Semiotics -- Periodicals; 801.95
• DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2020.1808298
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0950-236X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This essay draws attention to a lyric tendency that bypassed the human subject altogether. Writing as the losses of World War Two reached unprecedented historical highs, the poet Robinson Jeffers counselled a quietist retreat into 'inhumanism', the 'philosophical shifting of emphasis of man to not-man'. Jeffers – I argue – looked back to earlier modernists to emphasise the mineral world and to celebrate its resistance to organic metaphors; its predisposition to substantive temporal endurance rather than growth and decay; its emptiness of connotation and expression; its properly fundamental properties, hidden beneath the lurid topsoil of flora and fauna; its crystalline rather than cellular structure. This essay uses work by Jeffers himself, and the poets Hugh MacDiarmid, Muriel Rukeyser, and Francis Ponge, to discuss the emergence of a new kind of poetics between 1920 and 1950; one that privileged deep over human time, was cosmic in its scope, scientific in its orientation, and suggestive of a fresh species of the sublime.