CA. Other Poets and Works

11. Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962). Verse drama, 1929-41.

	‘The Japanese Nô plays, in which the action is performed by ghosts revisiting the scenes of their passions, no doubt influenced my conception.’ Image of Robinson Jeffers: .

Jeffers’s DEAR JUDAS (New York: Liveright, 1929; reprint 1977) has escaped notice in studies of Japanese influence in English-language poetry and verse drama, but is the most compelling pre-1950 extension of Yeats’s experiments with the nô. The ghosts of Judas, Jesus, and Mary, ‘Still haunt the garden [of Gethsemane] / . . .  / Re-dreaming under the moon [their] passions’ (p. 9). The language is from Yeats and his working through of the idea of the ‘dreaming back of the dead’ (see especially BL13), and the most immediate antecedent is Yeats’s CALVARY (BL17a), but the ontology and dramatic conception is of the mugen nô, even if, as in CALVARY and unlike the most powerful manifestations of the nô, the spirits are not released from their ‘unendurable memory’ (p. 27) and in the end remain caught in the ‘net’ from which no man ever has ‘cut himself loose’ (pp. 12, 36). As Robert J. Brophy notes in his afterword in the 1977 edition, the work may be divided into three parts, Judas’s dream (pp. 10-28), Jesus’s dream (pp. 29-39), and Mary’s dream (pp. 39-49), each of which relies upon the associational time of the nô instead of the chronology of the European stage. That Jeffers had the nô in mind during composition is clear enough from the text, but thrice in his later writing he makes the point explicit, in a note to his bibliographer, S. S. Alberts, (see A Bibliography of the Works of Robinson Jeffers [New York: Franklin, 1933], p. 57), a ‘Preface to “Judas”’ that preceded the first production of the play in 1947 (New York Times, 5 October, sec. 2, p. 3), and in a letter to Eva Hesse (see Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, 1897-1962, ed. Ann N. Ridgeway [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968], p. 369). ‘DEAR JUDAS was written in 1928, with the thought of presenting the only divine figure still living in the minds of people of our race, as the hero of a tragedy’, Jeffers wrote to Alberts. ‘The Japanese Nô plays, in which the action is performed by ghosts revisiting the scenes of their passions, no doubt influenced my conception’. Notes about the connection of the play to the nô may be found in Brophy’s afterword and in Diggory (BL212). A later Jeffers play in verse, THE BOWL OF BLOOD (in Be Angry at the Sun [New York: Random House, 1941]), is related to the nô through its fluid conception of time and sense of ritual, and to Yeatsian drama influenced by the nô in its use of ‘maskers’ functioning both as chorus and as dramatis personae and its central reliance on a sèance (see especially BL34), but lacks the close psychological relation to the nô of DEAR JUDAS.