It’s the birthday of the early 20th century poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), whose philosophy can be summed up as pro-nature, anti-humanity, resonating (however unintentionally) with a later 20th century thinker who said, “People. They’re the worst” (Jerry Seinfeld).

Jeffers was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and received a crazy-good education in classics and the Bible, due to his father being a Biblical scholar and professor. Jeffers started learning Greek when he was five, went to boarding schools in Germany and Switzerland, and graduated from Presbyterian Occidental College at 18. He went to grad school at the University of Southern California to study literature but also studied medicine and forestry. (I’m not sure if he ever finished a graduate degree and I’m not going to dig hard enough to find out. Ever have one of those days when the frozen coffee you picked up at Dunkin’ Donuts as your reward for getting your child to an 8:15 cello lesson in a semi-snowstorm just isn’t going to carry you through the day? Have you really? Me too.)

Jeffers married Una Call Kuster in 1913, moved with her to Carmel, California, and eventually built a stone cottage and 40-foot stone tower on Carmel Bay where he could Appreciate Nature and contemplate the degraded, self-centered, fairly abhorrent state of modern humanity. (Fair enough.) It was his third book of poetry, Tamar and Other Poems (1924), that established his reputation as an Important Poet. Many volumes followed, including the narrative poem The Woman at Point Sur (1927), Cawdor and Other Poems (1928), Thurso’s Landing and Other Poems (1932), and a much-lauded adaption of Euripedes’ Medea for the stage (produced in 1948); he became known as a master of the epic form.

(Do you ever say to yourself, Hey, frozen coffee comes in larger sizes: why did you buy the small? Why do you always buy the small?)

However, Jeffers’ opposition to U.S. involvement in WWII and the references he made to Hitler, Stalin, Pearl Harbor, and more led to a decline in his reputation. His book The Double Axe (1948) came with a publisher’s statement distancing Random House from the poet’s unpatriotic views. However, his reputation has made a comeback in recent years thanks to the burgeoning field of eco-poetics, which recognizes that nature really is great and people really are the worst.

Jeffers’ poem “The Bloody Sire” begins:

It is not bad. Let them play.

Let the guns bark and the bombing-plane

Speak his prodigious blasphemies.

It is not bad, it is high time,

Stark violence is still the sire of all the world’s values.

(Read the whole thing here.)

Appreciate the beauty of whatever nature is near you this fine white Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.