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The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers

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Robinson Jeffers is most often considered a minor figure in the twentieth century American literature canon. Countless instructors haven't even heard of him, but that is a shame. Some professors even skip the Jeffers section in American literature anthologies. With the publication of this long-awaited anthology (in paperback), there is plenty of evidence here to suggest that Jeffers is a major figure of influence.

Jeffers had a transcendental vision. He built a poet's niche in Carmel, where he commented on nature's cosmic cycles, its beauty and violence, which he saw as expressions of God's character. Jeffers was a poet of the Carmel landscape--weather worn granite, tumultous surf, birds of prey, twisted coastal cypress--he also approached descriptions of humanity's arrogance and weakness in light of its fascination with war, violence, and self-inscribed bloodshed. Jeffers espoused a poetic doctrine of Inhumanism, which was perhaps a reflection of his own personal misanthropy: humans are atoms to be split.

Some of my favorite poems are here: "Shine, Perishing Republic," "Boats in a Fog," "Carmel Point," "Divine Superfluous Beauty," "Tower Beyond Tragedy," "Bed by the Window," "Una," "The Deer Lay Down Their Bones," and even some of his last writing. I remember a certain Shakespeare class in which I read "Shine, Perishing Republic" on the day after the LA riots.

Robert Hass (UC Berkeley), C. Milosz (Emeritus, UC Berkeley), and William Everson have been poet champions of Jeffers' work. But one scholar, in particular, has dedicated his academic life to understanding that creative pulse, which inspired Jeffers to his pen. That notable scholar is Robert J. Brophy.

I highly recommend this anthology. I also recommend the scholarship of Robert Brophy. I can say with pleasure and esteem that I have benefited from his scholarship and literature courses at Cal State U., Long Beach. Bob Brophy introduced me to Jeffers (via a Jeffers course and a Tor House tour, 10/91); I have introduced Jeffers and his work to my own students, and I will forever be touched by his gentle, guiding hand.

Who was Robinson Jeffers? - A high priest of Nature? A proto-ecologist visionary? A lyric expounder of Fascism? An enemy of civilisation? An implacable misanthrope who spent his last years in his secluded lodging overlooking the Pacific, shunning what Edgar Allan Poe aptly referred to as "the tyranny of the human face"? His celebrations of war, his reverence for transhuman beauty, his dismissal of human egocentricity, and his pursuit of detachment and objectivity all suggest that he was either a befuddled hermit or an arch-hater of civilisation. Moreover, his fierce opposition to fanaticism and unfounded millennial hopes, his sanctification of greatness and his yearning to eradicate falsehoods and superstitions, - (such as human solipsism and anthropocentricsm) - and his registering of the urgings of religious awe tempt one to explain him away as a misanthrope. Both interpretations are wrong. Jeffers, a direct heir of the Transcendentalists Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman (he borrowed Whitman's long line, though failed to produce his sonic effects) stands as one of the finest poetic figures in neo-Romantic Modernism. His radical philosophy, which he called Inhumanism, is actually an attempt to totally think anew human conceptions regarding the nature and humanity, and is far too selective, complex, affirmative and far-reaching to be dismissed as simple misanthropy. It is for this reason that Jeffers's work has generated a vortex of academic dissent. The adage that "all great religions began as heresies" may receive sufficient demonstration in Jeffers' future critical reception. In this connection, it may be tempting to see Jeffers as another Prometheus, a seeker and bringer of Truth and Fire. His Inhumanism is a bold and powerful attempt to ennoble humanity through greater knowledge and self-scrutiny.

Jeffers would not be surprised by the timeliness of his poetry as issues of globalization, war, terror, environmental carelessness, and hubris once again flood our daily lives. His poetry resonates with a distaste for the very "inhumanities"--though he would consider them wholly human--that have brought us to this state of the world. The endless cycle which he mentions so many time is repeating itself once again, and his wisdoms and voice are gathered into a wonderful collection of his finest poetry.

One reading Jeffers in search of hope for humanity will be sorely disappointed, as his inhumanism is present on every page. It is not hopeless, however; the beauty of nature and the wild god of the world persist despite man's best efforts to tame and abolish them. Poems like "Vulture" are the only glimmer of hope that Jeffers has for mankind: recognize our place in the world and embrace it. That is the ultimate existence.

The 2007 Quinn Press "Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers" is NOT a new selection but a reproduction published by an on-demand printing company of the 1938 "Selected Poetry" that Random House originally published. That means it does not contain anything from the final 22 years of the poet's life -- nothing from "Be Angry at the Sun," "The Double Axe," "Hungerfield," "The Beginning and the End" or from his later uncollected poetry. If you want to buy the Random House 1938 selected, this new version by Quinn Press will do just fine, as long as you know what it is you're buying. It is valuable not just for the poems but for Jeffers' superb foreword in which he says, among many other things, that "I decided not to tell lies in verse. Not to feign any emotion that I did not feel." For a selection from the poet's complete work try the "Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers" edited by Tim Hunt and published by Stanford University Press in 2001. "Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems" is a small but useful selection of the shorter poems published as a Vintage Book (Random House) in 1963. "Rock and Hawk" is a longer selection of Jeffers' shorter poems edited and with a superb introduction by Robert Hass. I recommend it highly. Another fine brief compilation is "Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems" edited by Colin Falck for Carcanet Press in 1987. Tim Hunt has edited the first three volumes of Jeffers' "Collected Poetry" with the fourth volume slated for publication late in 2008.

I was first introduced to Jeffers in college. I was no fan of poetry then, and was intimidated by his style of writing. I recently picked it up out of curiosity, and have since been a convert. His writing has awakened my own interest in his work, and poetry in general.

From one casual reader to another, consider adding a little poetry to your reading list - and if you do, check out Robinson Jeffers. As another reviewer pointed out, this might be an under-represented collection of his works, so you may want to look around for a different volume. Better yet, look up some on the internet - he's dead, so its not like you are not stealing royalties from him.