Although Robinson Jeffers is well known as a forerunner for the environmental movement, more than half his entire poems focus on revealing the deceptive nature and mechanism of ideology. These poems are based on his conviction that human history is the repetition of barbarism. And he is convinced that humanity is central to this barbarism and its impurity tends toward an arrogant will to power over both the human and non-human worlds. Through the figures of saviors, he tries to contend that the human will to power becomes a vehicle for controlling other human consciousness. In fact, Jeffers employes the figures to dissolve the mechanism from which saviors naturalize their power and indoctrinate people with metaphysical lies, and to reveal the universal human tendency toward control. Jeffers believes that human history and civilization are controlled by an unseen center, which manipulates the individual psyche and behavior with fraud and fear. His concern with the center leads to an interrogation of the process of indoctrination and naturalization of power or ideology, in which all individuals are unified and homogenized. Jeffers’ interrogation of ideology, focusing on its universal process of producing meanings, aims at revealing the illusion of ideology. In many poems, therefore, he censures the deceptive nature of ideology and its working mechanism, political lies and conspiracies of all society members to support the dominant ideology. This view about ideology can be explained by the aid of the Frankfurt School who employed Freudian psychoanalysis and the Althusserian notion of ideology. Most of all, they share this belief that the deceptive ideology makes a seemingly autonomous subject submit itself to the dominant ideology of each society.
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