Inventing the Language to Tell It

George Hart is Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. He edited, with Scott Slovic, Exploring Social Issues through Literature: Literature and the Environment.

"George Hart's Inventing the Language to Tell It develops a significant new paradigm for engaging the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. By treating the central puzzle in Jeffers, the nature of consciousness, as a biological and environmental matter rather than a philosophical or psychological one, he clarifies the nature of Jeffers' modernity, defines its significance both for an understanding of Anglo American poetry in the first half of the 20-Century, and establishes its continued significance for the dynamics of environmental literature." -- -Tim Hunt Illinois State University "The mind-body problem, faced anew by the best thinkers in every age, grew ever more complex in the twentieth century as a result of revolutionary discoveries in biology and physics. As George Hart demonstrates in this brilliant, original, and essential book, no modern poet probed the mystery of consciousness more deeply than Robinson Jeffers, whose "sacramental materialism" outpaced even the boldest conjectures of neuroscience." -- -James Karman Emeritus Professor, English, Comparative Religion and Humanities. California State University, Chico "Inventing the Language to Tell It promises to open up significant new territory in the study of one of the most important and misunderstood twentieth-century American poets and in the rapidly developing field of ecocriticism. George Hart minces no words in diving right into the complicated and fascinating problem of Jeffers's push-pull relationship with "materialism and mysticism," finding that the author's literary strategies enable him to develop a "sacramental poetics" that accommodates these two, seemingly incompatible impulses." -- -Scott Slovic University of Idaho and editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

• Acknowledgments Introduction: Robinson Jeffers's Sacramental Poetics 1 Rock, Bark, and Blood: Sacramental Poetics and West Coast Nature Poetry 2 The Strain in the Skull: Biopoetics and the Biology of Consciousness 3 The Whole Mind: Brains, Biology, and Bioregion in the Middle Period 4 To Keep One's Own Integrity: "The Inhumanist" and the Crisis of Holism 5 The Wound in the Brain: The Discoveries of the Later Poetry Conclusion: The Jeffers Influence and the Middle Generation Notes Bibliography Index