A short life of the author
John Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) was born on 10 January 1887 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father, a professor of Old Testament literature at Western Theological Seminary, was a classicist and polyglot who gave his son a rigorous education in Greek, Latin, and modern languages. The young Jeffers studied at Occidental College, the University of Southern California, and the University of Zurich before settling in Carmel, California, in 1914, where he would live for the rest of his life.
Life and Career
In Carmel, Jeffers found the landscape that would become the theatre of his poetry. He built Tor House (1919) and Hawk Tower (1924) with his own hands from the granite boulders of the coast — an act of manual labour that expressed his philosophy of direct engagement with the physical world. He lived there with his wife, Una Call Kuster (they married in 1913), in deliberate isolation from the literary world.
His early collections — Flagons and Apples (1912) and Californians (1916) — were conventional and attracted little notice. The breakthrough came with Tamar and Other Poems (1924), self-published after commercial rejection, which was discovered by a New York reviewer and created a sensation. Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems (1925) was published by Horace Liveright and made Jeffers famous. For the next fifteen years he was widely regarded as one of the major American poets — he appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1932.
The long narrative poems — Tamar, Roan Stallion, The Women at Point Sur (1927), Cawdor (1928), Thurso’s Landing (1932), Give Your Heart to the Hawks (1933) — are set on the Carmel coast and deal in violence, incest, madness, and the conflict between human passion and the indifference of nature. They are unlike anything else in American poetry: dark, elemental, deliberately shocking.
Jeffers’s reputation collapsed after his adaptation of Medea (1946), which was a Broadway success but also marked the beginning of his public disgrace. The Double Axe (1948), a collection that included fierce criticism of American involvement in the Second World War and of Roosevelt, was published by Random House only with a publisher’s disclaimer dissociating the firm from the poet’s views. The critical establishment turned on Jeffers; his reputation has never fully recovered.
He died on 20 January 1962 at Tor House. The house is now a historic landmark.
Major Works and Themes
Jeffers’s philosophy — which he called “inhumanism” — holds that the non-human world has a beauty and significance that vastly exceeds the human, and that the proper response to the universe is not self-aggrandizement but awe. His poetry is deliberately anti-humanist: human dramas are set against the background of geological time, and the natural world — hawks, headlands, storms, granite — is rendered with a power that makes human affairs seem transient and small.
“Roan Stallion” (1925) tells the story of a woman on a remote California ranch whose encounter with a stallion becomes a mythic confrontation between civilisation and wildness. “Hurt Hawks” is his most anthologised poem — a meditation on the death of a wounded hawk that is also a statement of his aesthetic: “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.”
His adaptation of Euripides’ Medea (1946), starring Judith Anderson, ran for 214 performances on Broadway and remains a powerful dramatic text.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Jeffers was one of the most celebrated American poets of the 1920s and 1930s and one of the most reviled of the 1940s and 1950s. His political views — isolationist, anti-war, anti-humanist — were out of step with the liberal consensus, and the New Critics’ preference for complex, ironic, short lyric forms made his long narratives seem archaic. The environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s began a rehabilitation that continues: Jeffers is now recognised as a major ecological poet, a precursor of the deep ecology movement, and one of the most original voices in American literature.
Key Works
- Tamar and Other Poems (1924)
- Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems (1925)
- Cawdor and Other Poems (1928)
- Thurso’s Landing (1932)
- Give Your Heart to the Hawks (1933)
- Medea (1946)
- The Double Axe (1948)
Collecting Jeffers
Robinson Jeffers is a rewarding author to collect, with a clear hierarchy from the scarce early titles to the more widely available later Liveright and Random House editions.
Flagons and Apples (1912), his first book, privately printed in a tiny edition, is a genuine rarity and brings $2,000–$8,000.
Tamar and Other Poems (1924, Peter G. Boyle, New York) was self-published; the edition was small and the survival rate low. Copies bring $1,000–$5,000.
Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems (1925, Liveright) is more widely available at $300–$1,500.
Jeffers was published in numerous fine-press and limited editions — particularly by Ward Ritchie Press and the Grabhorn Press — that are collected both as Jeffers items and as examples of fine California printing. These editions, often signed, range from $200 to $2,000.
Signed copies are available. Jeffers was a cooperative signer at Tor House, where visitors sometimes obtained inscriptions. His correspondence and manuscripts are held primarily at the Harry Ransom Center and at Tor House.