A poet of extraordinary if occasionally misdirected power, Robinson Jeffers achieved critical and popular acclaim in the 1920s with verse that found in wild nature the Absolutes man was elsewhere denied. A political individualist and noninterventionist, Jeffers’s reputation declined during the Great Depression and World War II as the balmy statism of the New Deal gained favor among intellectuals. Since his death in 1962, however, Jeffers’s popularity has rebounded among students and scholars alike.

Jeffers was born on January 10, 1887, in Pittsburgh. He was the eldest son of an Old Testament theologian at Western Theological Seminary. As a child, Jeffers was educated in Europe and learned several languages, including Greek and Latin. In 1905, he graduated from Occidental College and later attended medical school at the University of Southern California. Jeffers married Una Call Kuster in 1913 and moved to Carmel a year later. There, he completed his first mature work, Tamar and Other Poems, which was published in 1924.

All of Jeffers’s adult verse is characterized by the poet’s prophetic voice and by themes of pantheism and Manicheanism-in-reverse, in which man ascends from a puny interior soul to the greater exterior world of matter and beauty. Though a believer in scientific as well as poetic efficacy, Jeffers viewed man as pessimistically—and sometimes cruelly—unwilling to set aside his ephemeral preoccupations. For those who could, however, a kind of dark goodness awaited.

Jeffers’s metaphysical conservatism—his sensitive attention to human limitation—was wedded to a cultural conservatism that abhorred the rise of commercialization and its most successful product, mass man. In poems like “Shine, Perishing Republic,” Jeffers advises flight from the American empire in words that acknowledge men as individually worthy but collectively monstrous.

Out of step with his time, the poet came under fire in the 1930s from New Criticism and Marxist writers who attacked what they perceived as his mock primitivism and callous stoicism. Jeffers was also criticized for exhibiting what one critic has called violent pacifism when he published a number of poems opposing American involvement in the Second World War. The collection, The Double-Axe and Other Poems (1948), though one of his weakest, remains a fascinating case study in liberal self-censorship: Bennett Cerf and Saxe Commins, the poet’s editors at Random House, forced Jeffers to drop ten antiwar (and sometimes anti-Roosevelt) poems from the manuscript and added in their place a disclaimer distancing themselves from Jeffers.

Although poet Robert Hass has correctly noted that Jeffers was never a meticulous user of language, Jeffers’s poetry appears to have considerable staying power, with readers still turning to his verse for its beauty.

• Coffin, Arthur B. Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Inhumanism. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971.
• Hunt, Tim, ed. The Collected Poems of Robinson Jeffers, 1920–1960. 3 vols. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988–91.
• Nolte, William H. Rock and Hawk: Robinson Jeffers and the Romantic Agony. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1978.