Inventing the Language to Tell It
Robinson Jeffers and the Biology of Consciousness
This book can be opened with
Note on our eBooks: you can read our eBooks (ePUB or PDF) on the free Fordham Books app on iOS, Android, and desktop. To purchase a digital book you will need to create an account if you don’t already have one. After purchasing you will receive instructions on how to get started.
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 Language
to Tell It shows how Jeffers produced the most compelling sacramental nature poetry of the twentieth century.
The mind–body problem, faced anew by the best thinkers in every age, grew ever more complex in the twentieth century as a result of revolutionary discoveries in biology and physics. As George Hart demonstrates in this brilliant, original, and essential book, no modern poet probed the mystery of consciousness more deeply than Robinson Jeffers, whose "sacramental materialism" outpaced even the boldest conjectures of neuroscience.
George Hart's Inventing the Language to Tell It develops a significant new paradigm for engaging the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. By treating the central puzzle in Jeffers, the nature of consciousness, as a biological and environmental matter rather than a philosophical or psychological one, he clarifies the nature of Jeffers' modernity, defines its significance both for an understanding of Anglo American poetry in the first half of the 20-Century, and establishes its continued significance for the dynamics of environmental literature.
“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.”