From 1920 until his death in 1962, consciousness and its effect on humanity and the natural world was Robinson Jeffers’s obsession. Understanding and explaining the biological basis of mind is one of the towering challenges of modern science to this day, and Jeffers’s poetic experiment is an important contribution to American literary history— no other twentieth-century poet attempted such a thorough engagement with a crucial scientific problem. Jeffers invented a sacramental poetics that accommodates a modern scientific account of consciousness, thereby integrating an essentially religious se ... More

From 1920 until his death in 1962, consciousness and its effect on humanity and the natural world was Robinson Jeffers’s obsession. Understanding and explaining the biological basis of mind is one of the towering challenges of modern science to this day, and Jeffers’s poetic experiment is an important contribution to American literary history— no other twentieth-century poet attempted such a thorough engagement with a crucial scientific problem. Jeffers invented a sacramental poetics that accommodates a modern scientific account of consciousness, thereby integrating an essentially religious sensibility with science in order to discover the sacramentality of natural process and reveal a divine cosmos. Inventing the Language to Tell It traces Jeffers’s creation of the poetics that expresses his sacramental-materialist vision, and it proposes that this poetics stands in contrast to modernism by its refusal to divorce mysticism from science. The tension between materialism and mysticism, oppositional powers harnessed together to achieve a single purpose, is the cardinal indicator of his sacramental poetics. This study examines this tension as it runs through his work, charting the initial struggle the poet had with accommodating consciousness to his sacramental materialism and detailing the gradual shift to an understanding of the biology of mind.