| My analysis of the poets Robinson Jeffers and Wallace Stevens focuses on their respective use of the term inhuman. Both poets, though seldom compared, share a common preoccupation with the world's cold facticity---that there is a world independent of, and indeed, indifferent to the human.In order to situate the two poets, I use Martin Heidegger as an interlocutor to explore how each of them deals with humanity's diminished stature in a post-Copernican, post-Darwinian universe.Elaborating on Heidegger's ideas about caring and dwelling, I suggest that each poet's gesture towards the inhuman is in fact the most human gesture, an attempt to take care of the invisible, the lost by reflecting the "the inhuman more," their poems work to set things free as they are. |
