Robinson Jeffers
The precipitous cliffs, rolling headlands, and rocky inlets of the California coast come alive in the poetry of John Robinson Jeffers, an icon of the environmental movement. In this concise and accessible biography, Jeffers scholar James Karman reveals deep insights into this passionate and complex figure and establishes Jeffers as a leading American poet of prophetic vision.
In a move that would define his life's work, Jeffers' family relocated to California from Pennsylvania in when he was sixteen. While a graduate student at the University of Southern California he met Una Call Kuster, a student who was the wife of a prominent Los Angeles attorney, and they began a scandalous affair that made the front page of the Los Angeles Times. They eventually married and escaped to Carmel, California to write poetry; there they would spend the rest of their lives.
At the height of his popularity in the s and s, Jeffers became one of the few poets ever featured on the cover of Time magazine, and posthumously put on a U.S. postage stamp. Writing by kerosene lamp in a granite tower that he had built himself, his vivid and descriptive poetry of the coast e
John Robinson Jeffers
American poet John Robinson Jeffers () glorified the stern beauties of nature. He saw the human race as doomed and often utilized Greek myths to emphasize man's tragic position in the universe.
Robinson Jeffers was born on Jan. 10, , in Pittsburgh, Pa., where his father taught at Western Theological Seminary. Young Jeffers rejected his father's belief in God but retained the Calvinistic sense of man as depraved and damned. Jeffers was reading Greek by the age of 5, and he attended boarding schools in Switzerland and Germany. He received a bachelor of arts degree in from Occidental College. He undertook graduate study in the sciences at several universities, studying medicine at the University of California. In an inheritance freed him to concentrate exclusively on writing poetry.
After his marriage in , Jeffers settled in Carmel, Calif., where he built a stone tower on a lonely cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and began to write. Though his earliest published poems were conventional romantic celebrations of nature, in Tamar and Other Poems () he found his voice in celebrating the supremacy of the inhuman. In Dear Judas and Other Poems () he p
Robinson Jeffers led one of the most fascinating and controversial careers of any American poet. His dates, to , are virtually identical with those of many of the greatest artists of international modernism, yet during a time when the post-symbolist lyric came to dominate poetry, he built much of his reputation on tragic verse dramas and wild, luridly violent book-length narratives that exude epic ambition.
In a time when many contemporary poets, following T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, insisted on the necessary difficulty of poetic language, Jeffers denounced their work as trivial mannerism and strove for clarity of rhetoric, feeling, and thought. Claiming that history and society drove him to despair, he nonetheless addressed politics as forthrightly as any poet of his time, although his isolationist stand drew scornful fire from many quarters beginning in the s. In a spiritual age which could best be characterized by the sublime disorder of “The Waste Land,” he built an antinomian faith on the rock of what he called “Inhumanism,” a mix of pantheism, science, and mystical worship of the fierce beauty of nature.
Jeffers was tremendously popular with the public and with influent
Robinson Jeffers was born in Pittsburgh on January 10, to Presbyterian minister and biblical scholar Dr. William Hamilton Jeffers and Annie Robinson Tuttle Jeffers. Dr. Jeffers took an active interest in his son’s education, tutoring him in the bible and classical languages and taking his family to Europe for extended stays. Much of Jeffers’s schooling was obtained in Germany and Switzerland between the years , during which time he mastered German and French and became conversant in Italian. In the final years of his stay in Europe, Jeffers began to read and write poetry. In the family returned to the U.S. and Jeffers enrolled in the Western University of Pennsylvania for the academic year.
In Dr. Jeffers retired and removed his family to Southern California in May, taking a rental property in Long Beach. Jeffers enrolled in then-Presbyterian Occidental College in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles with advanced standing as a junior at age In January the family moved into a home that the Doctor had built in Highland Park. While at Occidental, Jeffers served as literary editor of the college journal and contributed thirty-five poems to its pages, several fore
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