Such luminaries as Stanford’s late Yvor Winters, who in 1947 declared Jeffers’s work “unmastered and self-inflicted hysteria,” effectively banned him from the curriculum. Unlike most contemporary American poetry, his legacy has been kept alive by individuals who love his work, not by academia’s class-assignment sales. “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk,” he wrote. His exaltation of nature above humankind also ran counter to 20th-century sensibilities.
involvement in World War II turned respect to ridicule. Yet, as California poet Dana Gioia, ’73, MBA ’77, wrote in his essay “Strong Counsel,” “No major American poet has been treated worse by posterity than Robinson Jeffers.” Jeffers’s pessimism about the human race didn’t sit well during the dark Depression years, and his opposition to U.S. Tor House, the stunning, invincible granite cottage Jeffers built with his own hands in Carmel, Calif., remains the focus of literary pilgrimage. Time magazine put him on its cover in 1932, and The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers was reprinted so many times that Random House lost track of sales. One of the bestselling American poets ever, Jeffers (1887-1962) once ranked alongside T.S. Never heard of him? You’re not alone, and it’s rather a wonder.
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