The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers

Rating:
Summary: A Carmel Poet
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A true neglected master
Review: This is a terrific collection of poetry. Jeffers is, like James Emanuel (see other review) one of the most neglected poets of the 20th century. Better than Whitman, people are revolted by him for his politics, unable to distinguish life from metaphor. Emanuel has never really gotten his due & I never would have heard of him if it wasn't for this online site I stumbled upon. Also with Jeffers, I think he is largely misunderstood, and not being judged fairly. He is one of the TRUE alltime GREAT poets. Better than Yeats, I'd say (even though old W.B. is a Master in his own right).

Rating:
Summary: The Inhumanist
Review: 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.