Jeffers, (John) Robinson

Jeffers, [John] Robinson (1887–1962), born in Pittsburgh, traveled widely on the Continent until his family settled in California when he was 16. After graduation from Occidental College (California) and desultory graduate study of medicine and other subjects in the U.S. and abroad, he settled with his wife in the town of Carmel, whose surrounding country is the setting of his poetry. After two undistinguished volumes, Flagons and Apples (1912) and Californians (1916), containing his first California narratives and descriptive pieces, he published Tamar and Other Poems (1924), including two long works: the title narrative, adapting the Biblical legend to modern experience in a California scene, and “The Tower Beyond Tragedy” his own version of the legend of Orestes and Electra, in which Orestes finds salvation from the madness of self‐centered humanity by “falling in love outward” with his nonhuman surroundings. Other characteristic poems in the volume include the lyric “Night”; Boats in a Fog and Granite and Cypress, expressing Jeffers's love of the spare enduring beauty of the rocky coast on which he made his home; Shine, Perishing Republic, advising his sons to “be in nothing so moderate as in love of man …When the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains”; The Coast‐Range Christ, a tragically ironic narrative of California mountain people at Christmas; and the apostrophe To the Stone‐Cutters, comparing the poet's work to that of the stone‐cutter, both being conscious of ultimate futility, “Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found The honey peace in old poems.” These were reprinted with additions, the following year, in Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems, the new title piece⧫ being an allegorical legend of pantheism.

In The Women at Point Sur (1927), through the mad preacher Barclay, the poet again sets forth his conception of the need “to uncenter the human mind from itself,” while yet indicating the dangerous aspects of action in accordance with such a philosophic attitude. “Cawdor” in Cawdor, and Other Poems (1928), is a bitterly tragic narrative, in which Jeffers considers “human affairs …looking eastward against the earth, reclaiming a little dignity from that association….” Also included in this volume is Hurt Hawks, expressing the poet's concept of “the wild God of the world …intemperate and savage …beautiful and wild …,” whom the “communal people” have never known, or have forgotten. In 1929 he published Dear Judas, and Other Poems, whose title piece retells the story of the betrayal of Christ, describing Judas's motive as one of love. The Loving Shepherdess, in the same collection, is a parable of self‐sacrifice in its story of a girl who, knowing herself doomed to die, wanders over the countryside, devotedly caring for the dwindling flock of her dead father. Descent to the Dead (1931), written in England and Ireland, is a volume of elegies in the manner and often in the mood of their Greek models, forming a concise expression of Jeffers's poetic themes, the desire for an end of life, the breaking of the human mold, and the escape to nonhuman nature. In Thurso's Landing, and Other Poems (1932), the title narrative⧫ describes the fatally violent struggle of a California farmer and his rival for his wife's love. Give Your Heart to the Hawks, and Other Poems (1933) is a collection whose title narrative⧫ deals with the poet's frequent subject of a man who violates a human code, in this case by murdering his brother, and then finds himself alone in a world, beyond humanity, which is inhabited only by the fierce hawks of freedom and soaring flight. The title narrative of Solstice, and Other Poems (1935) is a retelling of the Medea legend, while At the Birth of an Age, in the same volume, is a drama set in the time of Attila. In Such Counsels You Gave to Me, and Other Poems (1937), the title narrative⧫ is a modern tragedy based on the old Scottish ballad Edward, Edward. The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers was issued in 1938.

Later books include Be Angry at the Sun (1941); Hungerfield and Other Poems (1945), including a version of Euripides' Hippolytus; Medea (1946), including a free adaptation of Euripides' drama to fit the modern theater; The Double Axe (1948); and a posthumous collection, The Beginning and the End (1963). “What Odd Expedients” (1981) prints uncollected and unpublished poems. Rock and Hawk, a selection of shorter poems, was published in 1987, and other, very incidental writings have also been printed posthumously. In addition, his Collected Poetry is being issued in a multi‐volume edition.

Jeffers's plots have a realistic setting of the granite cliffs, surf‐beaten shore, and towering redwoods of California, yet Jeffers never obscured the symbolism in his use of this background. Accepting a scientific view of the universe, in which man appears to be of but trivial importance, he made the core of his thought the renunciation of humanity and the reliance upon nature. Thus the melodramatic subjects of his narratives have an allegorical significance, and the frequent use of the incest theme symbolizes man regarding man exclusively and leading himself to destruction. From this stemmed his intense revulsion from society, expressed in such statements as “Cut humanity out of my being, that is the wound that festers.” He looked forward to the time when man would be driven from the universe, and the grass and the cliff would…enjoy wonderful vengeance and suck
The arteries and walk in triumph on the faces.
In this profound contempt for “the animals Christ was rumored to have died for,” and belief that solace will come to the earth only when, freed from humanity, it has attained a “white and most clean, colorless quietness,” he found war or any other negative force to be good, in that it cleansed civilization and led back to “the primal and the latter silences.”