It’s funny the way I did my first podcast. The software had just come in, and I was experimenting with the editing function. A copy of The Double Axe, by Robinson Jeffers, was on my desk, by happenstance, and I picked it up: it seemed to me that poetry and podcasting sort of go together. At any rate, I turned at random to the "Suppressed Poems" section, which includes poems deleted by publisher Bennett Cerf from the original Random House edition. These poems were deemed far too politically incorrect to be published in postwar America: criticism of Franklin Roosevelt? Not allowed! At any rate, the suppressed poems were published in subsequent editions, and they are searing. I read three of them herein, with commentary.
I have written about Jeffers here, and so I’ll just note that Jeffers was the leading poet of the 1920s, a Taft Republican whose opposition to the war pervaded his later books, and led to his exile from the leftist-dominated Popular Front literary community, which fulsomely supported both the President and the war: they were the neocons of their day.
Jeffers is one of my favorite writers, not only for his poetic imagination and prose style but also on account of his politics, best expressed in his poem "Shine, Perishing Republic":
"While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire, And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens, I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth. Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother."