On the eve of World War II, elementalist poet, standing in thought to the right of the Political Right and as critical of traditionalists for their departure from the Truth as he was of the New Left, seemed to have given up in despair that Man will ever learn a thing as a species.

In Bloody Sire, Jeffers contends in the last line of all four verses of this abrupt poem that, “Violence has been the sire of all the world’s values.”

To people involved in war or the war arts such a contention might not seem to be so profoundly blasphemous as it is now in the general population and was in Jeffers’ day. In acknowledging the essential truth of this poem, seemingly inspired by Nietzsch, the reader should bear in mind that our Society is entirely based upon the promotion of the delusion of the opposing value; that state-sponsored goons protect and serve, that taking is giving, that making is taking, that foreign wars are defensive actions waged by a defense department as opposed to plundering by a war department, etc.

Reading Jeffers is, on a cultural level, something like falling into a mass grave at dawn and wondering—or hoping—if it is instead dusk.