Exploring American Humanity and American Nature through the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Herman Melville, and Lorine Niedecker

December 8, 2022 Gideon Leek Leave a comment

The mythology of the vast “untouched” frontier has inspired American authors from James Fenimore Cooper to Thomas Pynchon. But, the natural world explored in the poetry of the early 20th century American poet Robinson Jeffers is not one of heroism or horses. Gillian Osborne – Instructor and Curriculum Designer for Poetry in America, Director of Curriculum at ASU’s Center for Public Humanities, and scholar of 19th century American and environmental literature – compares Jeffers’s reverence for American nature, and his Californian “cultural nationalism,” to famous American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau’s relationship with the natural world in the century before.