The cadence of Jeffers’ creativity glides gracefully over the rugged uplands of his musings on the universe and its pervasion, the earth and its changes and then descends into briefer flights of meditation on man’s perversion. In 1941, after penning the tersely worded The Excesses of God as embodied in the natural order his spirit seems to spiral back to the reeking sandcastles of Man’s machinations:
“Between news-cast and work-desk—
The little chirping sirens, alcohol, amusement, opiates,
And carefully sterilized lust—
Than the angels of life?...”
One can see already, in 1941, a poet’s disgust with the cunningly veiled system of state propaganda known as news. Jeffers never seems to lose his capacity to be amazed by the willful forgetfulness of humanity and will soon turn his words toward the more understandable night.
He: Gilgamesh: Into the Face of Time
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