With it, I flung myself as forfeit, for the first time, into some unknown dimension of existence. I saw with unaccustomed clarity and cast far out. Silently I sought and picked up a still-living star, spinning it far out into the waves. The next day, he resolved to find the young man again. In the small hours of the night, he wrestled with himself, why this event thrust him into so much turmoil. Still dejected and desolate, Eiseley went away but he was disturbed by this encounter, ridiculous though he found it. The account goes, while taking a walk, depressed, he met a young man on the beach gently throwing stranded starfish into the retreating surf so they wouldn’t die. When I first read “The Star Thrower” from The Unexpected Universe, I was deeply moved at this melancholic man finding how to once again connect to himself, life, and the world. I first encountered Eiseley through his essays. For years as a young man, he travelled the country as a hobo, escaping from a difficult family life, before deciding that he had to become educated and entered university. He gained recognition first as a scientist and then as a man of letters. He made his name, of course, with his books of poetic prose on the natural world like The Unexpected Universe, The Night Country and The Invisible Pyramid. Auden, his poetry came to be seen by many critics as not worthy of notice. Oddly, despite his awards for his prose, it’s Loren Eiseley’s poetry that most affects me.

Both men’s poetry explored their alienation from that myth in rather different ways. Their lives also speak to me in a personal way beyond just literature.īoth men would have recognized the truth of the Romanian philosopher’s statement about the myth of Progress. Loren Eiseley and Robinson Jeffers are two of my literary heroes. Henceforth we continue to advance, but without enthusiasm, automatically, in forced complicity with an idea that has become, by all evidence, an agent of destruction. The eclipse of this myth is the single most important fact of our epoch.

Loren eiseley poems