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Robinson Jeffers

1887–1962
Picture of Poet Robinson Jeffers sitting on rocks.
Photo by Nat Farbman/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

Robinson Jeffers was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. The son of Presbyterian minister and Biblical scholar, Dr. William Hamilton Jeffers, as a boy Jeffers was thoroughly trained in the Bible and classical languages. The Jeffers family frequently traveled to Europe, and Robinson attended boarding schools in Germany and Switzerland. In 1902, Jeffers enrolled in Western University of Pennsylvania; when his family moved to California, he transferred to Presbyterian Occidental College as a junior. Jeffers graduated from college at age 18.

Jeffers studied literature, medicine, and forestry during his years as a student at the University of Southern California and the University of Washington. In 1906 he met a fellow graduate student, Una Call Kuster. The two fell in love, though at the time Una was married. They married in 1913, the day after Una’s divorce was finalized, and moved to Carmel, on California’s coast. Jeffers and his wife lived in Carmel for the rest of their lives, building the stone “Tor House” and “Hawk Tower,” both of which figure prominently in his work. It was at the beginning of his time in Carmel that Jeffers turned exclusively to writing poetry.

Jeffers’ first volume of verse, Flagons and Apples, appeared in 1912, but it was the 1924 publication of Tamar and Other Poems that brought him attention. In the ensuing years his lyrics, written in a rugged, free-verse line derived from Walt Whitman, and his psychologically probing narrative poems, written in traditional blank verse, made him famous. Nature not only serves as a backdrop for Jeffers’s verse; animals and natural objects are frequently compared to man, with man shown to be the inferior. “There is not one memorable person,” Jeffers wrote in Contrast, “there is not one mind to stand with the trees, one life with the mountains.” Jeffers preferred nature to man because he felt that the human race was too introverted, that it failed to recognize the significance of other creatures and things in the universe.

Jeffers termed his philosophy “inhumanism,” which he explained was “a shifting of emphasis from man to not man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. ... It offers a reasonable detachment as a rule of conduct, instead of love, hate, and envy.” Humanity had been spurned by an uncaring God, Jeffers believed, so each individual should rid himself of emotion and embrace an indifferent, nonhuman god. To develop his philosophy of inhumanism, Jeffers drew on his extensive reading in philosophy, religion, mythology, and science. Critics have connected Jeffers’s ideas to those of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lucretius, and cyclical historians such as Giambattista Vico, Oswald Spengler, and Flinders Petrie.

Certain motifs and symbols recur in Jeffers’s poetry and serve to underline his poetry's philosophical stance. Many of his narrative poems include images of rape or incest, which Jeffers uses to emphasize the danger of man’s introversion. Jeffers was not noted for his technical ingenuity, but he did develop a style that meshed with his philosophy. Poet, critic, and anthologist Louis Untermeyer praised Jeffers for his “gift of biting language and the ability to communicate the phantasmagoria of terror.” Critic Selden Rodman noted that Jeffers wrote his poetry “with a one-dimensional straightforwardness that is almost Homeric. And the similes he uses, if not Homeric, are as primitively American as the flintlock and the Maypole.”

Jeffers reached the pinnacle of his fame early. In 1932 he was on the cover of Time, and in 1946 his version of the Greek drama Medea played on Broadway. But popular opinion began to turn against Jeffers when a full formulation of his doctrine seemed to calmly foresee the extinction of the human race. Some of his political views, including references in his work to Pearl Harbor, Hitler, Stalin, and Roosevelt, were also uneasily received in the period after World War II. His collection, The Double Axe (1948), included a publisher’s warning on the potentially “unpatriotic” poems inside.

Over time, Robinson Jeffers regained his central place in the burgeoning field of eco-poetics. His uncompromising work celebrates the enduring beauty of sea, sky and stone and the freedom and ferocity of wild animals, and strives to create a vision of world in which human experience is productively questioned, qualified, and even decentered. Jeffers’ efforts to shift “emphasis and significance from man to not-man” and his prophetic rage at his country’s imperial ambitions have resonated with later readers and been crucial influences on such West Coast poets as William Everson, Yvor Winters, Gary Snyder and Robert Hass.

Jeffers died in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California in 1962.

Poems by Robinson Jeffers
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Bibliography

POETRY

  • Flagons and Apples, Grafton Publishing, 1912, reprinted, Cayucos Books, 1970.
  • Californians, Macmillan, 1916, reprinted, Cayucos Books, 1971.
  • Tamar and Other Poems, P. G. Boyle, 1924.
  • Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, Boni & Liveright, 1925.
  • The Women at Point Sur, Boni & Liveright, 1927, reprinted, Liveright, 1977.
  • Poems, The Book Club of California, 1928.
  • Cawdor and Other Poems, Liveright, 1928, reprinted with play, New Directions, 1970.
  • Dear Judas and Other Poems, Liveright, 1929, reprinted, 1977.
  • Descent to the Dead: Poems Written in Ireland and Great Britain, Random House, 1931.
  • Thurso’s Landing and Other Poems, Liveright, 1932.
  • Give Your Heart to the Hawks, and Other Poems, Random House, 1933.
  • Solstice and Other Poems, Random House, 1935.
  • Such Counsels You Gave to Me and Other Poems, Random House, 1937.
  • The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Random House, 1938.
  • Be Angry at the Sun, Random House, 1941.
  • The Double Axe and Other Poems, Random House, 1948, reprinted, Liveright, 1977.
  • Hungerfield and Other Poems, Random House, 1954.
  • The Loving Shepherdess, Random House, 1956.
  • The Beginning and the End and Other Poems, Random House, 1963.
  • Selected Poems, Vintage Books, 1965.
  • The Alpine Christ and Other Poems, Cayucos Books, 1974.
  • Brides of the South Wind: Poems 1917-1922, Cayucos Books, 1974.
  • What Odd Expedients and Other Poems, edited by Robert I. Scott, Shoe String Press, 1981.
  • Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems by Robinson Jeffers, edited by Robert Hass, Random House, 1987.
  • The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, edited by Tim Hunt, Stanford University Press, Volume I: 1920-1928, 1988, Volume II: 1928-1938, 1989.
  • The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, edited by Tim Hunt, Stanford University Press, 2001.

PLAYS

  • Medea (based on Euripides’s play of the same name; first produced on Broadway in 1948), Random House, 1946, reprinted with Cawdor, New Directions, 1970.
  • The Tower Beyond Tragedy (based on Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Jeffers’s poem of the same name), first produced in 1950.
  • The Cretan Woman (based on Euripides’s Hippolytus), first produced in 1954.

OTHER

  • Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years, Ritchie, 1949, reprinted, Folcroft, 1974.
  • Themes in My Poems, Book Club of California, 1956.
  • Ann N. Ridgeway, editor, The Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, 1897-1962, Johns Hopkins Press, 1968.
  • The Last Conservative, Quintessence, 1978.
  • Songs and Heroes, introduction by Robert J. Brophy, Arundel Press, 1988.
  • The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers (edited by James Karman), Stanford University Press, Vol. 1, 2009; Vol. 2, 2011; Vol. 3, forthcoming.

 
 

Further Readings

BOOKS

  • Beers, Terry, A Thousand Graceful Subtleties: Rhetoric in the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, P. Lang, 1995.
  • Bennett, Melba Berry, Robinson Jeffers and the Sea, Gelber, Lilienthal, 1936, Norwood, 1976.
  • Bennett, Melba Berry, The Stone Mason of Tor House: The Life and Work of Robinson Jeffers, Ward Ritchie, 1966.
  • Brophy, Robert J., Robinson Jeffers, Dimensions of a Poet, Fordham University Press, 1995.
  • Brophy, Robert J., Robinson Jeffers: Myth, Ritual and Symbol in His Narrative Poems, Press of Case Western Reserve, 1973.
  • Carpenter, Frederic I., Robinson Jeffers, Twayne, 1962.
  • Carpenter, Frederic I., The Twenties, Everett/Edwards, 1966.
  • Coffin, Arthur B., Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Inhumanism, University of Wisconsin Press, 1971.
  • Concise Dictionary of Literary Biography: The Twenties, 1917-1929, Gale, 1989.
  • Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 2, 1974, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 11, 1979, Volume 15, 1981, Volume 54, 1989.
  • Dickey, James, Babel to Byzantium, Farrar, Straus, 1968.
  • Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 45: American Poets, 1880-1945, First Series, Gale, 1986.
  • Everson, William, Robinson Jeffers: Fragments of an Older Fury, Oyez, 1968.
  • Gilbert, Rudolph, Shine, Perishing Republic: Robinson Jeffers and the Tragic Sense in Modern Poetry, Haskell, 1936.
  • Gilbert, Rudolph, Four Living Poets, Unicorn Press, 1944.
  • Glicksberg, Charles I., Modern Literary Perspectivism, Southern Methodist University Press, 1970.
  • Jartell, Randall, The Third Book of Criticism, Farrar, Straus, 1969.
  • Karman, James, Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California, Story Line Press, 1995.
  • Kreymborg, Alfred, Our Singing Strength, Coward, 1929.
  • Littlejohn, David, Interruptions, Grossman, 1970.
  • Mazzaro, Jerome, editor, Modern American Poetry: Essays in Criticism, McKay, 1970.
  • Nolte, William Henry, Robinson Jeffers and a Galaxy of Writers: Essays in Honor of William H. Nolte, University of South Carolina Press, 1995.
  • Powell, Lawrence Clark, Robinson Jeffers: The Man and His Work, Primavera Press, 1934, revised edition, Haskell, 1940.
  • Ransom, John Crowe, editor, Kenyan Critics, World Publishing, 1951.
  • Rexroth, Kenneth, Assays, New Directions 1961.
  • Rosenthal, M. L., The Modern Poets, Oxford University Press, 1960.
  • Southworth, James G., Some Modern American Poets, Basil Blackwell, 1950.
  • Squires, Radcliffe, The Loyalties of Robinson Jeffers, University of Michigan Press, 1956.
  • Sterling, George, Robinson Jeffers: The Man and the Artist, Boni & Liveright, 1926.
  • Untermeyer, Louis, Modern American Poetry, Harcourt, 1950.
  • Van Wyck, William, Robinson Jeffers, Ward Ritchie, 1938.
  • Vardamis, Alex A., Critical Reputation of Robinson Jeffers: A Bibliographical Study, Shoe String Press, 1972.
  • Waggoner, Hyatt H., American Poets From the Puritans to the Present, Houghton, 1968.

PERIODICALS

  • Harvard Review, winter, 1963-64.
  • Poetry, July, 1954.
  • Saturday Review, January 16, 1954.
  • Sewanee Review, summer, 1969, winter, 1972.
  • Virginia Quarterly Review, summer, 1963.