Once shunned for his unpopular political views and harsh critiques of mankind’s egotism, Robinson Jeffers has regained popularity in recent years as environmentalism’s most forceful poet-advocate. His uncompromising work celebrates the enduring beauty of sea, sky and stone and the freedom and ferocity of wild animals in contrast to human pettiness, meddling and greed.

Although closely associated with the town of Carmel on the California coast—where he built his stone “Tor House” and “Hawk Tower” and lived from 1914 until his death—Jeffers was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and spent much of his boyhood at boarding schools in Europe.

His father, a stern Presbyterian minister and professor of the Old Testament, trained Robinson in Greek and Latin; by the time he began college at 15, he knew six languages. In 1905, after the family re-located, Jeffers graduated from California’s Occidental College, then studied English, medicine, and forestry. Marrying in 1913, and determined to be a poet, he settled a year later in Carmel, where his wife and muse Una gave birth to a girl who died in infancy and to twin sons.

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. In 1932 he was on the cover of Time, and in 1946 his version of the Greek drama Medea played on Broadway.

The poet’s reputation was tarnished in 1948, though, when The Double Axe included a full formulation of his doctrine of “Inhumanism,” which calmly foresaw the extinction of the human race, and his criticism of America’s participation in World War II. There was also a reaction against his work’s violence and its recurrent treatment of taboo subjects like incest, which for the poet served as a metaphor for man’s “inwardness.” Still, 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.

Major Works

Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems (1925)
The Women at Point Sur (1927)
Give Your Heart to the Hawks and Other Poems (1933)
The Double Axe (1948)
Hungerfield and Other Poems (1954)
The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (Ed. Tim Hunt; 2001)
The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers (Ed. Albert Gelpi; Stanford UP, 2003.)

Recordings

Poetry Speaks, ed. by Elise Paschen and Rebekah Presson Mosby, features recordings of Jeffers reading “The Day is a Poem (September 19, 1939)” and “Oh, Lovely Rock.”

The actress Judith Anderson—for whom Jeffers adapted Euripides’ tragedy Medea—recorded a selection of the poet’s work in 1970 for Caedmon Records—TC 1297.

POEMS
Carmel Point
Rock and Hawk
Shine, Perishing Republic
The Bloody Sire
The Treasure