By 1914 modernism was already transforming American poetry. Ezra Pound and Imagism were unavoidable presences; [T. S. Eliot's] "Prufrock," as yet unpublished, was four years old; and Wallace Stevens was about to write "Peter Quince" and "Sunday Morning." In 1914, though, Robinson Jeffers was still poetically adrift. Two years younger than Pound, a year older than Eliot, he was still imitating his Romantic and Victorian predecessors. His mature idiom was a full six years in the future, and "Tamar," which would make his reputation, would not be completed until 1923. Even so, by 1914 Jeffers had (by his own report) already made his "final decision not to become a 'modern'" ["Introduction," Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems]

Even if the modernist work Jeffers would have been reading in Poetry and other magazines was not yet The Waste Land or The Cantos, it already offered the one decisive alternative to nineteenth-century attitudes and techniques, and Jeffers' rejection of it is in some ways surprising. Why should he have chosen to write long narratives when the mode seemed hopelessly old fashioned? Why, in his shorter poems, to blend painstaking naturalistic detail with direct statement and forego the sophisticated formal experiments and indirection of his most talented contemporaries? Why, most simply, should he turn his back on the dynamic world of modern British and European art toconcentrate instead on the isolated landscape of California's Big Sur coast and the simple, though intense, people of the foothill ranches that surrounded his home in Carmel? Some have wanted to assume he was a California original, a primitive, looking west from the "continent's end" without realizing, or caring, what was behind him in New York or London or Paris. But Jeffers was not a primitive. Rather, the Calvinist faith of his minister father and his own immersion in the world of modern science helped direct his sophistication in a radically different direction from his modernist contemporaries.

Jeffers' early years were dominated by his father, a professor of Old Testament literature and biblical history at Western Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian school on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. Dr. William Hamilton Jeffers was a 46-year-old widower when he married Annie Robinson Turtle, a church organist 22 years his junior. John Robinson Jeffers was born a year and a half later on January 10, 1887. Jeffers' only sibling, Hamilton, a prominent research astronomer, was born in 1894. Jeffers' father was a reserved man impatient of childish play. He introduced his first son to Latin, Greek, and the tenets of Presbyterianism early on, and Jeffers' first ten years were a succession of houses and schools as the elder Jeffers looked for the right combination of seclusion for himself and intellectual rigor for his son. In 1898 Jeffers entered the first of five Swiss boarding schools, and four years later, when he entered what is now the University of Pittsburgh, Jeffers already had a mastery of French, German, Greek, and Latin to go with his newest enthusiasm—Dante Gabriel Rossetti and poetry. After his first year of college, the family moved to Los Angeles for Dr. Jeffers' health. Jeffers enrolled at Occidental College, where he graduated two years later with coursework in astronomy and geology to supplement biblical literature and Greek. Then came a year and a half of graduate study, first at the University of Southern California and then the University of Zurich. Jeffers' courses included Old English, Dante, Goethe, Spanish Romantic poetry, and late nineteenth-century French literature.

When Jeffers returned from Zurich in September 1906, he was not yet twenty and already had what even Pound would have seen as a promising start for a modernist-to-be. Had Jeffers encountered a Santayana at this point, as did Stevens and Eliot at Harvard, or even an energetic and opinionated peer such as Pound, as did H.D. and Williams at Pennsylvania, his work might well have developed differently, but Jeffers spent the next six months translating German medical papers and then in 1907 enrolled in the USC medical school, where he excelled in physiology and earned an assistantship in his second and third years. He left in 1910 without completing his training and entered the University of Washington to study forestry. A year later he returned to Los Angeles, again, without completing his studies.

How seriously Jeffers considered either profession is not clear. Certainly he was already developing his interest in poetry. By 1911 he had already written a number of the imitative, dandyish poems of Flagons and Apples, which he issued privately in 1912 after receiving a small inheritance. Whatever his sense of vocation, though, medicine and forestry would have been a sharp contrast to his literary studies. Both emphasized direct and close observation of the actual world and involved alternative views of time and tradition. Moreover Jeffers' medical studies would have introduced him to modern biology in a more than casual manner, while his study of forestry would have strengthened his interest in a specifically Western landscape and offered a view of nature unmediated by poetic conventions.

Jeffers' early and mid-twenties were also years of personal turmoil. However much he may have resented the strict round of study imposed by his father, Jeffers was, through his boarding school years, a properly shy and studious minister's son who presumably acted from his sense of doctrine and belief, rather than mere obedience. But by the time Jeffers entered medical school at twenty his allegiance had begun to shift to the religion of art and the wine, women, and song appropriate to a turn of the century poet-to-be. This drift might have simply replaced his earlier views (it did for many of his generation) had he not become increasingly involved with a married woman, a situation which neither his father's values nor the priorities of his bohemianism seemed able to resolve. Jeffers met Una Call Kuster when both were literature students at USC. She was three years older, and their relationship apparently started innocently and probably continued that way for a time. By 1910 the matter was a serious concern to both and likely a factor in Jeffers' decision to leave for Washington to study forestry. However, when he returned to Los Angeles at the end of that year, the affair began again and became known to Una's husband, a young Los Angeles attorney. Scandal and divorce followed.

On August 2, 1913, Robinson Jeffers and Una Call Kuster were married. Witty, vibrant, and ambitious, Una Jeffers became a prime force in her husband's life. She had faith in his talent as a writer and the will to discipline him to that faith. The crisis of courtship might have confirmed Jeffers' bohemianism. Instead it was the beginning of a renewed moral seriousness. This is not to suggest his affair left him guilty for his actions nor that he came to accept society's norms or his father's. Rather, the crisis seems to have combined with the deaths of his father and infant daughter and the discovery of the West as a subject for his writing to commit him to struggle with the question of whether actions have moral consequences in a world where the methods and discoveries of science had already undercut the pieties of the past.

It may seem odd to suggest Jeffers needed to discover the West when he had already spent a number of years in Los Angeles and Seattle. But Los Angeles took its cue from other centers of fashion. It was, that is, provincial. Los Angeles tyros read The Smart Set right along with their Chicago and New York counterparts, and their fantasies were of Europe. Jeffers, judging from his letters, even toyed with becoming a sort of Los Angeles F. Scott Fitzgerald. Certainly at the time of his marriage the West meant relatively little to him in terms of his writing. He and Una planned to settle in Europe and presumably would have done so had she not become pregnant. Their daughter, born in May 1914, survived only a day, and by the time the couple was ready to consider the move again, the war in Europe persuaded them to look closer to home.

In September of 1914, they traveled north to Carmel, probably because it was something of an artists' colony, a rustic and inexpensive spot of culture. The decisive factor that led them to settle there, though, and the decisive factor for Jeffers' work, was the landscape itself and the people of the isolated ranches and farms about it. These demanded to be viewed on their own terms, not through any European lens or lens of literary convention. As Jeffers wrote in the "Foreword" to The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, "for the first time in my life I could see people living—amid magnificent unspoiled scenery—essentially as they did in the Idyls or the Sagas, or in Homer's Ithaca. Here was life purged of its ephemeral accretions. … Here was contemporary life that was also permanent life; and not shut from the modern world but conscious of it and related to it." The intensity of this new landscape coming on top of his scientific training, courtship and marriage, the death of a child, and the first signs of Europe's political and cultural collapse led Jeffers, apparently within months, to his aesthetic declaration of independence. Whatever he would be as a poet, he would not be "a 'modern.'"

For Jeffers (reacting against the modernist work found in the little magazines of the time) the moderns were writing a poetry of form, not content, a poetry that indulged technique for its own sake. And if this work celebrated the imagination's power to remake the materials of the tradition, to him it did so, finally, be celebrating the aesthetic object's superiority over the ordinary and actual. His training in science, however, meant he could only be satisfied with an art that used the imagination to attend to the actual, not escape it. To Jeffers, that is, the work of the early Pound and others seemed a poetry of fashion, and the world he had discovered in Carmel was anything but fashionable. It was, though, in Jeffers' view, fundamental, authentic, and relevant to the larger world. It offered the freedom to be regional without being provincial, which Los Angeles did not, and just as importantly, Carmel suited the energetic severity of his temperament at a time when his training in the sciences had freed him to respond to it. Just as importantly, this new, yet archaic, world seemed to require a poetry of moral seriousness at a time when his own personal experience and the reality of world conflict seemed to make such seriousness imperative….

The first phase of Jeffers' independence appeared in Californians, published by Macmillan in 1916. Like his later volumes, Californians featured several narratives of the rural West. Narrative gave Jeffers scope to portray this new landscape and even more importantly allowed him to explore the connection between the land itself and the people who inhabited it (or as he would later think of the matter, the people who expressed it). But these early narratives, though a decisive turn from his contemporaries and his own earlier work, are largely unsuccessful. Their traditional meters, rhyme, and diction fail to match the expansiveness of the material, and they read as if Jeffers, freed from the need to be technically fashionable, simply assumed he could borrow his form from tradition and allow the subject to make its own way. More importantly, the narratives of Californians, and those recently recovered from the few years following it, show Jeffers vacillating between a sentimental and a superficially nihilistic treatment of nature. In some of the poems nature offers a simplistic, if reassuring, moral norm to the human world. In others the world of nature moves with one logic while a seemingly disconnected human world moves with quite another; characters violate norms only to find that nature has no interest in their affairs and that society is unlikely to discover what they have done. In these poems Jeffers' sense of science freed him to look intensely and without preconception, but it also effectively divorced the human world from the natural. If his mood demanded a poetry of moral seriousness, the lesson of modern science seemed to deny that possibility. The perspective of science undercut any sense of a moral outcome to what he observed, even as it gave him access to his material and freed him from his contemporaries.

In the years immediately following Californians, Jeffers struggled with his work and the problem of the war. He temporarily abandoned narrative, trying his hand at an epic drama modeled on Hardy's The Dynasts, and then turning to sonnets. Both directions provided elegant, but stiff and mannered, comments on the moral and political crisis of Europe. Meanwhile Jeffers worried whether or not to enlist. Twin sons born in 1916, a wife, and a less than ample income argued no, but his application to serve was pending when the war ended. The war years, though, did confirm his desire to stay in Carmel. Shortly after the Armistice, he and Una purchased a headland on the south edge of Carmel and hired a local mason to build a low stone cottage from the granite about the site. Working with the masons, Jeffers discovered his other life's work—building with stone. After the house was completed, he began a six-year project, the construction of a two-and-a-half story stone tower, and he fell into the routine of his mature years—writing in the morning, stone work or planting and caring for his forest of trees in the afternoon.

Whether it was the war, the increased pattern and discipline of his life, or simply the trial and error of poem after poem, Jeffers' work began to coalesce shortly after the move into Tor House when he returned to writing narrative and working with local material. The first narratives after the war were written as ballads, the one after that in long-line couplets. None are fully successful, but they show Jeffers worrying again the problem of violence and nature, as he had in Californians, and pressing toward a resolution that came first in several short poems sometime in the early 1920's. The key was a minor, but telling, shift in emphasis in his sense of nature. In lyrics such as "Natural Music" he began to focus on nature itself and view it as a living organism, with man simply one of its elements, one of its expressions.

This shift in emphasis, from the life of individuals to the life of nature, enabled Jeffers to synthesize his sense of science with his Calvinist heritage, even as he discarded the latter's specific forms and justifications. Both Calvinism and science taught that man was not the measure of the world, and both, in different ways, taught that the world itself might be inherently beautiful and worthy of worship. Once Jeffers came to see the observation of nature and the observation of human actions, even perverse and violent ones, as inherently the same act of witness and to see the expression of them as a further witness to the inscrutable dynamism of nature, he began to overcome the dichotomy that had marred much of his earlier work. Poetry could not resolve, nor need it, the conflicts of nature or human experience. Poetry's task was to confront, reveal, and praise the grandeur of a universe in flux.

Jeffers apparently thought of this new mode at first primarily as one that allowed him to write lyrics that praised the beauty of nature in a new, more direct way. The lyrics that followed "Natural Music" show him quickly mastering the long, unrhymed accentual line that would be the basis of the rest of his writing. But sometime in 1922, perhaps quite early 1923, he seems to have realized his new sense of nature could be the basis of narrative as well. His reading of Freud and Jung likely played a role in this, along with his reading of the Cambridge anthropologists and their studies of ancient myth and ritual. Whatever the impetus, the return to narrative fulfilled the promise of his first sense of his Carmel material and resulted in the poem that would gain him recognition as a major poet.

Like his earlier narratives (and later ones) "Tamar" portrays a perverse, violent human world: Tamar's incest with her brother and her father, her father's earlier incest with his sister, the conflagration Tamar brings about to destroy herself, her brother, her father, and her lover. But in "Tamar," unlike the earlier narratives, Jeffers came to view nature itself as fundamentally in conflict—a cycle of destruction and renewal—and this recognition allowed him, finally, to write poems that combined his sense of modern science and high moral seriousness, even though the lessons of "Tamar" were neither specifically scientific nor moral in the usual sense of those words. In Jeffers' scheme, human conflict is an analogue of the larger rhythms of conflict in the natural world. The human world, though, is often blind to its own status and thus dooms itself to play out the cycles in an unnecessarily perverse, violent, and empty manner. In the narratives, Jeffers' characters are largely unable to recognize or accept themselves as elements of nature, and this dooms them to suffer nature's power without experiencing the compensatory vision of its beauty (even if that beauty is itself of the painful motion of stars consuming in flame, of rock eroding, of hawk dropping to feed). The characters can become more or less aware of their cycle and can even, as Tamar does, hurry on destruction, but finally the real salvation in these poems is the one available to reader and poet and comes from recognizing our place in nature, which frees us to witness the transcendent beauty of destruction and renewal and to accept its liberating beauty, even if the cycle of renewal takes place on a scale that never renews (only destroys) the individual ego.

Initially, Jeffers seems not to have known what to do with "Tamar." He first considered grouping it with a series of poems written in response to the First World War, as if that violent episode would best explain the violence of this new work. He then, apparently, came to see this new direction in his narrative work as of a piece with his more recent lyrics, restructured the collection, and after some months of hesitation chose to issue the volume privately, even though the printer he'd hired was so impressed with the collection that he offered to act as publisher. When Tamar and Other Poems did finally appear in April 1924, it made no more impression initially than Californians. After nearly a year, though, chance brought it to the attention of several major reviewers, and Jeffers suddenly found himself compared to the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, Whitman, and a few others for good measure. Whatever the reviews left undone, Tamar's scandalous plot finished, and when Boni & Liveright reissued it in November 1925 in an expanded edition as Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, Jeffers became a popular, as well as critical, success. Ten major trade collections followed between 1927 and 1954, first with Liveright and then with Random House.

In the years following Tamar, Jeffers was intensely productive. He explored the implications of his breakthrough in such pieces as "The Tower Beyond Tragedy," a recasting of Aeschylus's Oresteia, and "Roan Stallion," another narrative of the California coast. Jeffers' most ambitious project, though, was The Women at Point Sur. He apparently began working on early versions of it almost immediately after "Tamar" and struggled with what he hoped would be "the Faust of this generation" through early 1927. In Point Sur he explored a topic that would recur in a number of later poems, that of the savior who mistakenly turns from his vision of nature's power and beauty to seek control of disciples.

Jeffers' longest, and in many ways most complicated, poem, The Women at Point Sur was less favorably received than Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems. But reviewers took his status as a major figure for granted, and his reputation remained strong through the rest of the 1920's and the early 1930's, as he produced Cawdor and Other Poems (1928), Dear Judas and Other Poems (1929), Thurso's Landing and Other Poems (1931), and Give Your Heart to the Hawks and Other Poems (1933). In these volumes Jeffers turned more to his characters' human dilemmas, the problems of guilt, of pain, of endurance. As a result, the narratives of this period tend to be more realistic, though less mythic, and to explore the characters' psychologies in more detail. These volumes, which refined and extended the directions implicit in his early work, have been among Jeffers' most popular.

After Give Your Heart to the Hawks, the narratives at least came more slowly. Solstice and Other Poems (1935), Such Counsels You Gave to Me and Other Poems (1937), and Be Angry at the Sun (1941), were generally less well received than the earlier volumes, though they contained some of Jeffers' finer short poems. Part of the problem may have been a kind of fatigue: Jeffers' work had consistently derived from his thematic perspective and formal principles of the early 1920's. Part of it may have been the Second World War. Jeffers' saw it coming earlier than most, and if the First World War had helped precipitate his mature work, this impending conflict threatened his creative equilibrium. Even though his vision of nature argued that war was a fact of nature, a part of the order of things, and so essentially beautiful and inevitable, the suffering it would bring and its futility challenged the answers of the early 1920's. As a result his work increasingly took the form of shorter meditations on contemporary politics or addressed explicitly the tenets of what he came to call in 1948 "Inhumanism," "a philosophical attitude" that called for "a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence." ["Prefact," The Double Axe and Other Poems].

A confirmed isolationist, Jefferson pleased few contemporary readers with his poems of this period, even though they have proved surprisingly prophetic. The war itself led to two of his most distinctive narratives, "The Love and the Hate" and "The Inhumanist." The first, written at the end of the war, is perhaps Jeffers' most controversial narrative, tracing the revenge of a soldier who physically returns from the dead to punish those whose blindness and hypocrisy have sent him to die. The second, perhaps Jeffers' most philosophical and allegorical narrative, examines the attempts of an isolated old man to maintain his integrity and balance despite the threats of society and its violence. Together "The Love and the Hate" and "The Inhumanist" made up the title sequence of The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948), a volume whose references to contemporary political figures, especially in its short poems, so upset his editors at Random House that they insisted on including an editorial disclaimer. Whether the editors properly understood the poems or the politics, the fact that the volume was published at all, even under such circumstances, suggests Jeffers was still regarded as a major figure in the late 1940's, though an increasingly isolated and troubling one. His other major project of the 1940's was his adaptation of Euripides' Medea, He had prepared the text in 1945 at the request of the tragic actress Dame Judith Anderson. The play was produced in late 1947 and was, like Roan Stallion, a major critical and commercial success.

Jeffers continued to write after The Double Axe, but intermittently. Traveling in Ireland in 1948, he nearly died from pleurisy. Shortly after that Una Jeffers began her own battle; she died of cancer in 1950. Jeffers' last narrative, the brief and poignant "Hungerfield," shows how devastating this loss was. It was collected, along with several short poems and an adaptation of Euripides' Hippolytus, in Hungerfield and Other Poems (1954), the last volume Jeffers published. Although Hungerfield was received more positively than The Double Axe, it was less popular than most of his earlier volumes—perhaps because he had, by and large, ceased to be a topic of discussion. The New Criticism of the 1950's had little patience for either narrative or direct statement, and critics such as Yvor Winters and R. P. Blackmur condemned both Jeffers' ideas and what they took to be his slack line and inflated rhetoric. The work of Jeffers' final years was compiled by Melba Berry Bennet, his biographer, and appeared as The Beginning and the End in 1963, the year after his death on January 20, 1962. In the 25 years since, Jeffers has attracted a steadily growing readership and renewed critical and scholarly interest.

Whatever future readers and historians may decide, it is clear that Jeffers made good his vow not to "be a 'modern,'" but it should also be clear that Jeffers, in his own quite different way, developed a distinctly modern poetry. Chance and decision led him to an alternative model to Pound's, one that owed more to Milton, Wordsworth, Darwin, and modern astronomy than to Coleridge, Mallarmé, Pater, and Hulme. Where the modernist aesthetic stressed the power of the imagination to transform perception, Jeffers' aesthetic stressed the paradoxical energy of consciousness and the way it allowed us to perceive our place in nature and yet, thereby, alienated us from it in self-consciousness. Where modernism emphasized the word as a thing to be valued for its own inherent properties, Jeffers treated it for its referential power. And where modernism viewed the poem as an aesthetic object, Jeffers viewed it as utterance, a kind of prophetic speech.

All of these matters reflect Jeffers' sense that poetry points to reality rather than transforming or replacing it and that poetry's task is to demonstrate the permanent and universal. At times these views give his work a didactic quality, but he saw no reason poems should not include direct statement. And if these attitudes placed him distinctly at odds with his modernist contemporaries and made his work, finally, technically more conservative than theirs, it may be that his sense of the interplay of culture and nature was in many ways more radical and forward looking. If Pound and others sought to make their poems permanent, Jeffers sought to make his reveal the permanences beyond the poem:

Permanent things are what is needful in a poem, things temporally
Of great dimension, things continually renewed or always present.

Grass that is made each year equals the mountains in her past and future;
Fashionable and momentary things we need not see nor speak of.

Man gleaning food between the solemn presence of land and ocean,
On shores where better men have shipwrecked, under fog and among flowers,

Equals the mountains in his past and future; that glow from the earth was only
A trick of nature's, one must forgive nature a thousand graceful subtleties.
("Point Joe")