Review
DISSENTING FROM THE "GOOD WAR": BEARD, JEFFERS, AND ANTI-IMPERIALISM
Jeffers Studies, Vol.19, pp.82-110
01 Jan 2020
Abstract
Perhaps the occasion of Richard Drakes new study, Charles Austin Beard: The Return of the Master Historian of American Imperti alism (Cornell University Press, 2018), will provide impetus to do so. Jeffers own pessimism derived from Wordsworth and Hardy, but both men felt too the long shadow of Darwin, and with it the waning of traditional religious faith that made the renewal of value a deeply problematic enterprise. For Beard, human history would be too complex and in some respects too aleatory a field to yield simple causal judgments or reliable projections of the future, while for Jeffers, with his Jeffersonian view of freedom, virtue could only be cultivated, at least on a social level, by democratically dispersed power and individual self-sufficiency. Nor did the dead lie still; in The Women at Point Sur and "Resurrection," and after World War II in "The Love and the Hate," revenants of the slain come home to exact justice, thus confounding the idea of war altogether.
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Details
- Title
- DISSENTING FROM THE "GOOD WAR": BEARD, JEFFERS, AND ANTI-IMPERIALISM
- Creators
- Robert Zaller
- Publication Details
- Jeffers Studies, Vol.19, pp.82-110
- Publisher
- Robinson Jeffers Association; Long Beach
- Resource Type
- Review
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- History
- Identifiers
- 991021877136504721