‘It is based on a recognition of the astonishing beauty of things and their living wholeness, and on a rational acceptance of the fact that mankind is neither central nor important in the universe; our vices and blazing crimes are as insignificant as our happiness. […]  Turn outward from each other, so far as need and kindness permit, to the vast life and inexhaustible beauty beyond humanity. This is not a slight matter, but an essential condition of freedom, and of moral and vital sanity.’

– Robinson Jeffers, from ‘Preface to The Double Ax and Other Poems’

One could say that it was Jeffers himself that inaugurated the ‘inhuman turn’ in poetry, philosophy, and naturalism in our time. From him proceed the first stirrings of a new thought, the notion that humans are no longer the pinnacle of creation, that they are animals within the animal kingdom, and that as far…