The Carmel area hold a very special place for me. We'd spend summers not far from there, and I remember the rugged beauty --much of which is still there, however, there are far more homes there now. I always wanted to return to live there, but things haven't worked out that way. Alas, let me get my book done, and work my way there.I've been reading a lot of California literature as of late. One person I've stumbled upon is Robinson Jeffers, who lived in Carmel in the first half of the 20th century. What has crept over me the past decade or so, is the fact that when I was young, the educational Eurocentrism and East Coast dominance pervaded our curriculum to the point where we didn't cover many western writers or artists.
Back then, few but serious writers and Californians knew about Steinbeck. With poetry, we were rightfully taken through Dickinson and Frost --even Burns, but weren't introduced to one of the most gifted and important American poets of the 20th century, Robinson Jeffers.
He was an anti-modernist, a bit of an isolationist --more so during WWII, when his antiwar feelings made him unpopular. He loved his surroundings --the rugged cliffs of Carmel, where he started building his stone house from granite, situated on the tors in 1918. Tor House still stands today, and is the home of a yearly poetry festival (take note: they have a contest each year, and you should probably keep tabs and submit).
It was from here he pondered his relationship to his surroundings, and explored his feelings about love, change and the state of man. But here's an epic poet, one who wrote for himself. And so, as I was reading, I was aware of a lack of pretense. Opinion, absolutely. But there was none of the writing to please or to be popular (that you find in coffee houses). He wrote what he felt, in which there is a freedom that is so rare, it's to be deeply admired (even envied).
I'll let you explore more about him, if you wish. If you look him up on Amazon, you can even go through one of his books electronically!
Promise Of Peace
The heads of strong old age are beautiful
Beyond all grace of youth. They have strange quiet,
Integrity, health, soundness, to the full
They've dealt with life and been tempered by it.
A young man must not sleep; his years are war,
Civil and foreign but the former's worse;
But the old can breathe in safety now that they are
Forgetting what youth meant, the being perverse,
Running the fool's gauntlet and being cut
By the whips of the five senses. As for me,
If I should wish to live long it were but
To trade those fevers for tranquillity,
Thinking though that's entire and sweet in the grave
How shall the dead taste the deep treasure they have?
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