Poet's Gods: Stevens' Words, Jeffers' World-as-God

Adalaide Kirby Morris. Wallace Stevens, Imagina- tion and Faith. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974. 205 pp. Robert J. Brophy. Robinson Jeffers, Myth, Ritual, and Symbol in His Narrative Poems. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press. 1973. 321pp. Two white upper-middle-class conservative male poets raised as Presby- terians in the same language, time, and country could hardly produce less similar poetry than did Wallace Stevens and Robinson Jeffers. Adalaide Kirby Morris of Georgetown University sees Stevens as inventing poetic fictions to replace the Christian God he found no longer believable, while Robert Brophy of the California State University at Long Beach shows how five of Jeffers' narratives use Greek tragedy's plot structure, myths, and seasonal metaphors to celebrate the natural world as God. Stevens seems desperate or arch; Jeffers, calmly in earnest.