The world of "made" is not the world of "born" : America and Edge of the Continent

Abstract

At the beginning of his great 1927 poem Women at Point Sur, Robinson Jeffers offers a harsh judgment of the American mind as a producer of a culture of avoidance or evasion. In Jeffers’ words, ‘You chose to ignore consciousness, incredible how quickly / The American mind short-circuits by ignoring its object. / Something in the gelded air of the country’ (Jeffers, 1927: 26). It is a commentary on the conversation that Reverend Barclay has just had with a boy working at a hotel, and whose opinion as to a possible existence of God he is asking. Since there comes no answer to the interrogation, ‘Do you think there’s a God?(...)