No bitterness: our ancestors did it.
They were only ignorant and hopeful, they wanted freedom but wealth too.
Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.
Or rather—for we are not aquiline Romans but soft mixed colonists—
Some kindly Sicilian tyrant who’ll keep
Poverty and Carthage off until the Romans arrive,
We are easy to manage, a gregarious people,
Full of sentiment, clever at mechanics, and we love our luxuries.

ROBINSON JEFFERS  (1887-1962)

“The poetry of Robinson Jeffers is oriented toward nature — as compared with nature, humans are inferior, and God is indifferent. His poems celebrate the lasting beauty of sea, sky, and stone, the freedom and force of wild animals. Jeffers’s philosophy of ‘inhumanism’ starts out from the idea that man is too selfish to understand the beauty of nature and of things. Because of Jeffers’s anti-war attitude (he opposed America’s participation in the Second World War), some of his poems were considered unpatriotic” (Osam Američka Pjsenika, Jeleni Odlažu Kosti [Eight American Poets, The Deer Lay Down Their Bones] Omer Hadžiselimović and Marko Vešović, ed.,Esma Hadžiselimović and Milorad Pejić, comps., [Prag: Samizdat, 2021]).  Translated by Wayles Browne

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