Photo © Edward Weston

Robinson Jeffers

On January 10, 1887, Robinson Jeffers was born. His father, a professor of Old Testament Literature and Biblical History at Western Theology Seminary in Pittsburgh, supervised Jeffers's education, and Robinson began to learn Greek at the age of five. His early lessons were soon followed by travel in Europe, which included schooling at Zurich, Leipzig, and Geneva. When the family moved to California, Jeffers, at age sixteen, entered Occidental College as a junior. He graduated at eighteen.

Jeffers immediately entered graduate school as a student of literature at the University of Southern California, where, in a class on Faust, he met another strong influence on his intellectual development: Una Call Kuster, who would later become his wife. In the spring of 1906, he was back in Switzerland studying philosophy, Old English, French literary history, Dante, Spanish romantic poetry, and the history of the Roman Empire. Returning to USC in September 1907, he was admitted to the medical school. The last of his formal education took place at the University of Washington, where he studied forestry.

After marrying in 1913, Jeffers moved to Carmel, California, and in 1919 he began building a stone cottage on land overlooking Carmel Bay and facing Point Lobos. Near the cottage, Jeffers built a forty-foot stone tower. Both the structure and the location figure strongly in Jeffers's life and poetry. Jeffers verse, much of which was set in the Carmel/Big Sur region, celebrates the awesome beauty of coastal hills and ravines that plunged into the Pacific. With few exceptions, his poetry praises "the beauty of things" in this setting and emphasizes his belief that such splendor demands tragedy.

Jeffers brought enormous learning in literature, religion, philosophy, languages, myth, and sciences to his poetry. One of his favorite themes was the intense, rugged beauty of the landscape in opposition to the degraded and introverted condition of modern man. Strongly influenced by Nietzsche's concepts of individualism, Jeffers believed that human beings had developed an insanely self-centered view of the world, and felt passionately that we must learn to have greater respect for the rest of creation. Many of Jeffers's narrative poems use incidents of rape, incest, or adultery to express moral despair. The Woman at Point Sur (1927) deals with a minister driven mad by his conflicting desires. The title poem of Cawdor and Other Poems (1928) is based on the myth of Phaedra. In Thurso's Landing (1932), Jeffers reveals, perhaps more than in any of his poems, his abhorrence of modern civilization. His many other volumes include Solstice and Other Poems (1935), containing early use of the Medea story, to which he later returned.

During the late 1930s and the 1940s Jeffers's genius was judged to have faded, and many of his references to current events and figures (for example, Pearl Harbor, Teheran, Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt) raised questions about his patriotism in a period of national strife. The Double Ax (1948) even appeared with a disclaimer from the publisher. However, Jeffers's adaptation of Euripedes' Medea (1946) was a great success when it was produced in New York in 1947. Robinson Jeffers died in 1962.

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