WHY DID JEFFERS OMIT "SHINE, PERISHING REPUBLIC" FROM TAMAR AND OTHER POEMS AND HOW MIGHT IT MATTER?

In the first and most common, a student reads the poem in an anthology where it is dated 1935, because the anthology editor has drawn it from the 1935 Modern Library reissue of Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, ignored the original 1925 edition, and carelessly assumed that the copyright date for the reissue's Introduction is the copyright date for the poems (this misdating occurs, alas, in a widely used anthology from a major publisher.)1 The student then, quite plausibly, registers the "America" that is "thickening to empire" as the America of the Great Depression and perhaps even registers the "corruption" that is to be avoided as connected to the Isolationism Jeffers expressed as the 1930s progressed toward the Second World War. The absence of the shorter poems written after "Tamar" requires no explanation, but the presence of "The Dance of the Banner," "The Murmansk Landing," and "The Beginning of Decadence," three early poems Jeffers did not include in Tamar and Other Poems, helps clarify why he included "Shine, Perishing Republic" in this initial or early version of the collection. The sonnet sequence is the title poem for the earliest of the pre-Tamar collections (it was then titled "God's Peace in November"), and Jeffers included it in Selected Poetry.3 The inclusion of "Shine, Perishing Republic" in the early table of contents points to a possible explanation for Jeffers' decisions about which early poems to include in this early version of Tamar. In it, six poems written during World War I or reflecting directly on it follow "Tamar" in chronological order: "The Songs of the Dead Men" written in 1917; "Mai Paso Bridge," "The Dance of the Banner," and "The Murmansk Landing" written across 1918 (and probably in that order); "The Beginning of Decadence" from spring 1920; and "Shine, Perishing Republic" written a year or so after that (CP 5: 34-36, 40-42, 52, 59-60).