The Selected Poetry Of Robinson Jeffers

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Customer Reviews:

A Carmel Poet

By Flounder - September 28, 2002

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... read more

The Inhumanist

By TheIrrationalMan - May 11, 2001

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... read more

timely

By dwain confer - March 15, 2007

Jeffers would not be surprised by the timeliness of his poetry as issues of globalization, war, terror, environmental carelessness, and hubris once again flood our daily lives. His poetry resonates with a distaste for the very "inhumanities"--though he would consider them wholly human--that have brought us to this state of the world. The endless cycle which he mentions so many time is repeating itself once again, and his wisdoms and voice are gathered into a wonderful collection of his finest poetry.

One reading Jeffers in search of hope for humanity will be sorely disappointed, as his inhumanism is present on every page. It is not hopeless, however; the beauty of nature and the wild god of the world persist despite man's best efforts to tame and abolish them. Poems like "Vulture" are the only glimmer of hope that Jeffers has for mankind: recognize our place in the world and embrace it. That is the ultimate existence.