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John Robinson Jeffers (January 10 1887–January 20 1962) was an American poet, known for his work all about a central California coast. Virtually all of Jeffers' poetry was written around classic narrative and epic form, but now he is too known for his short verse, & considered an icon of the environmental movement.

Life

Jeffers was natural around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the seminary dormitory, a boy of a Presbyterian minister, Reverend Dr. William Hamilton Jeffers, & Annie Robinson Tuttle. His brother was Hamilton Jeffers, who became the easily-known stargazer, working at Lick Observatory. His personal was supportive of his interest within poetry. He traveled across Europe when you took his youth & attended school inside Switzerland. He was the wonder child, concerned around classics and Greek and Latin language and literature. At 16 he entered Occidental College. At school, he was an inspiring outdoorsmen, & active in the school's literary society.

Fallowing he graduated from either Occidental, Jeffers went to the University of Southern California to study medicine. He met Unthe Call for Kuster around 1906; she was threesome years his senior, a grad student, & the married woman of a Los Angeles lawyer. She & Jeffers began an affair that became a scandal, reaching the front report of the Los Angeles Times. Jeffers left a Los Angeles locality & observed refuge as a forestry student at a University of Washington. He & Una eloped, & ended higher inside Monterey County, California.

Una fell sick by using cancer & died around 1950. She got played numerous roles for him: lover, married woman, muse, protectress, & his ears & eyes on the social globe he shunned. Jeffers's go volume, Hungerfield & More Verse form (1954), contains the moving eulogy to Una, world health organization for him could keep close at hand are nearest to embodying Inhumanism, his philosophy that a non-individual was further crucial than the human being in the cosmos. Jeffers died within Carmel, California; a posthumous collection, A Beginning & a Prevent & More Verse form, appeared within 1963.

Poetic career

In the Twenties & Thirties, at the height of his popularity, Jeffers was notable for existence a hard backpackers, sleep in relative solitude & writing of the difficulty & beauty of the untamed. He spent virtually all of his life inside Carmel, California, in a granite home that he got built himself known as "Tor House". He afterwards built the big 4-storey stone tower on the places known as Hawk Towe, based on similar structures he experienced seen traveling across Ireland. Constructiin on Tor Home continued into a late 1950s & early Sixties, & was completed by his firstborn boy. A completed at home was utilized as a personal home his until descendent decided to let it run terminated to the Tor Home Foundation, formed by Ansel Adams, for historic preservation. a romanticist gothic tower was known as when a hawk that appeared when Jeffers was working on the structure, & which disappeared the day it was completed.

In a period of this instance Jeffers published volumes of yearn narrative verse that shook higher the national literary scene. These verse form, including Tamar & Roan Stallion, introduced Jeffers as a master of the heroic form, remindful of ancient Greek poets. These verse form were good of controversial subject matter such as claw, slaying & parricide. Jeffers' short verse includes "Hurt Hawks", "The Purse-Seine", & "Shine, Perishing Republic". His incredible relationship by owning a physical globe is described inside typically brutal & revelatory verse, & demonstrates a preference for the natural globe above what he understands when the blackball influence of civilization. Jeffers did non assume a idea that meter is a fundamental part of poetry, &, rather Marianne Moore, claimed his verse was not composed within meter, however "rolling stresses". He believed meter was imposed in poetry by human, non the fundamental section of its nature and severity. Inside an essay coroneted "Robinson Jeffers & the Metric Fallacy" http://cosmoetica.com/S2-DES2.htm, poet and critic Dan Schneider echoes Jeffers' sentiments: "What if someone actually said to you that all music was composed of just 2 notes? Or if someone claimed that there were just 2 colors in creation? Now, ponder if such a thing were true. Imagine the clunkiness & mechanicality of such music. Think of the visual arts devoid of not just color, but sepia tones, & even shades of gray."

Ab initio, Tamar & More Verse form received there are no eclat, however whilst East Coast reviewers found a act & began to compare Jeffers to Greek tragedians, Boni & Liveright reissued an expanded edition as Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems (1925). Within these works, Jeffers began to articulate themes that contributed to what he late identified when Inhumanism. Humankind was as well self-egoistic, he complained, & as well indifferent to the "astonishing beauty of things". Jeffers's hanker & virtually all challenging story, A Women at Point Sur (1927), startled several of his readers, heavy loaded when it was by owning Nietzschean philosophy. A balance of a Twenties & the early Thirties were especially productive for Jeffers, & his reputation was locate. Inside Cawdor & More Verse form (1928), Dear Judas & More Verse form (1929), Descent to the Dead, Poems Written around Irel& and Smashing Britain (1931), ''Thurso's Landing (1932), & Springiness Your systems Heart to the Hawks'' (1933), Jeffers continued to choose a questions of how else mortal beings may buy their proper relationship (unhampered individual egocentrism) with a divinity of the beauty of items. These verse form, placed in a Heavy Sur vicinity (except Dear Judas & Descent to a Dead), enabled Jeffers to pursue his belief that a natural splendor of a front yard demanded tragedy: a greater the beauty, the greater the require. When Euripides had, Jeffers began to focus more in his have characters' psychological science & in social realities than on the mythic. A individual quandary of Phaedra, Hippolytus, and Medea fascinated him.

Numerous books followed Jeffers' initial profits using a heroic form, including an adaptation of Euripides' Medea, which became the hit Broadway play starring Dame Judith Anderson. D.H. Lawrence, Edgar Lee Masters, Benjamin De Cassseres, and George Sterling were close friends of Jeffers, Sterling having the longest and most intimate relationship with him. Jeffers was an inspiration to american U.S. lensman of the early twentieth century, including Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. When sleep in Carmel, Jeffers became the focal point for a microscopic, however devoted class action of admirers.

At a peak of his fame he was one of a pack poets to become featured on the handle of Time Magazine. He was likewise asked to page through at a Library of Congress, and was posthumously pretended the U.S. Stamp. His verse form use been translated into numbers of languages & published a lot on top the world. He is virtually all popular within Japan and the Czech Republic. William Everson, Edward Abbey, and Mark Jarman come upright two or three recent authors world health organization use been influenced by Jeffers. He was as well an influence on the poetic function of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosc.

A big collections of Jeffers' manuscripts & materials come in a Humanities Locate Center at the University of Texas and in the libraries at Occidental College, the University of California, and Yale University. A collection of his letters hwhen been published as The Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, 1887–1962 (1968). More books of criticism & poetry by Jeffers come: Poetry, Gongorism & the Thousand Years (1949), Themes around The Verse form (1956), Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems (1965), A Alpine Christ & More Verse form (1974), What Odd Expedients" and Other Poems (1981), and Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems by Robinson Jeffers (1987).

Biographical studies include George Sterling, Robinson Jeffers: The Man and the Artist (1926); Louis Adamic, Robinson Jeffers (1929); Melba Bennett, Robinson Jeffers and the Sea (1936) and The Stone Mason of Tor House (1966); Edith Greenan, Of Una Jeffers (1939); Mabel Dodge Luhan, Una and Robin (1976; written in 1933); Ward Ritchie, Jeffers: Some Recollections of Robinson Jeffers (1977); and James Karman, Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California (1987). Books about Jeffers's career include L. C. Powell, Robinson Jeffers: The Man and His Work (1940; repr. 1973); William Everson, Robinson Jeffers: Fragments of an Older Fury (1968); Arthur B. Coffin, Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Inhumanism (1971); James Karman, ed., Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers (1990); and Robert Zaller, ed., Centennial Essays for Robinson Jeffers (1991). The Robinson Jeffers Newsletter, ed. Robert Brophy, is a valuable scholarly resource.

Quotations

"No understanding for astonishment: sure as shooting 1 universally knew that cultures decompose, & life's prevent is demise" (The Purse-Seine, 1937) "Long survive freedom & damn a ideologies" (The Stars Go over the Lonely Ocean 1940) "Corruption never has been mandatory; after a cities lie at a monster's feet there are left a mountains" (Shine, Perishing Republic, 1941) "I personally'd faster, except the penalties, wipe out the human than a hawk" (Hurt Hawks, 1926)

Bibliography

Flagons and Apples. Los Angeles: Grafton, 1912. Californians. New York: Macmillan, 1916. Tamar and Other Poems. New York: Peter G. Boyle, 1924. Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925. The Women at Point Sur. New York: Liveright, 1927. Cawdor and Other Poems. New York: Liveright, 1928. Dear Judas and Other Poems. New York: Liveright, 1929. ''Thurso's Landing and Other Poems. New York: Liveright, 1932. Give Your Heart to the Hawks and other Poems. New York: Random House, 1933. Solstice and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1935. Such Counsels You Gave To me and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1937. The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. New York: Random House, Be Angry at the Sun. New York: Random House, 1941. Medea. New York: Random House, 1946. The Double Axe and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1948. Hungerfield and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1954. The Beginning and the End and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1963. Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems''. New York: Vintage, 1965.

Tor House Foundation
Maintains and provides public access to the Tor House and Hawk Tower, Jeffers' home on California's Big Sur coast. Includes essays on Jeffers and his wife Una.

Jeffers Studies
Published quarterly by California State University Long Beach. Included are news and notes, memoirs, reviews abstracts, short refereed articles, bibliography, and the Una Jeffers Correspondent series.

The Robinson Jeffers Page
Informational site at San Antonio College LitWeb.

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)
Jeffers resources at Perspectives in American Literature, including primary works, selected bibliography, and photographs of the author.

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)
Georgetown University teaching guide to Jeffers's works.

Robinson Jeffers and Narrative Poetry
From 1949 lecture by Lawrence Powell at UCLA.

Robinson Jeffers
Brief biography, selected bibliography, and a small selection of poems.






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