DARK MOUNTAIN’S UNCIVILISED WRITING AND ROBINSON JEFFERS Shedding Light on the Dark Mountain through the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers

Abstract

The Dark Mountain Project is a community of writers that seeks to create literature that reflects a poetic vision similar to the inhumanist perspective expressed in Robinson Jeffers’s poetry. The movement’s manifesto lists eight principles of Uncivilisation as a departure point for a style of writing they name Uncivilised writing. In this essay, I use three of these principles as a framework for reading Jeffers’s poetry in order to elucidate aspects of the movement’s manifesto, as well as the concept of Uncivilised writing as a novel form of nature writing largely influenced by Jeffers’s inhumanist poetics.