BASC80115 - Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Inhumanism

Course Description

Instructor: Charles Elder

A close, critical reading of some of the major poems of Robinson Jeffers—including “Shine, Perishing Republic,” “Roan Stallion,” and other shorter poems—with a view toward what he himself described as the doctrine of “inhumanism”—i.e., the idea that not only is man “not the best thing in the universe,” as Aristotle had proclaimed, but that he is nothing by comparison to the immensity of the world as we come to know it through modern science—and that the human destiny, if it is possible to speak of one, is most probably one of decline and, ultimately, annihilation. Good beach reading.

Notes

For the first meeting, please read: "Shine, Perishing Republic,” “Their Beauty has More Meaning,” and “Original Sin.”