Robinson Jeffers: Poet and Prophet

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) arguably never achieved the stature of his contemporaries Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, or William Carlos Williams, but he forged his own poetic path all the same. Jeffers scholar Karman, in this straightforward expansion of his introduction to The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, recounts the poet’s life and work. Karman matter-of-factly chronicles Jeffers’s life from his childhood and education in Europe and his peripatetic college years to his adulterous affair with Una Kuster, whom he married in 1913 following her divorce from her first husband, after which the couple moved to Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif. Karman also gives close readings of Jeffers’s poems, showing that their greatest theme was the relationship of Eros and Thanatos. While most of his contemporaries composed lyric poetry, Jeffers wrote narrative verse and drama, often recasting Greek tragedies such as Euripides’ Medea in modern settings. Karman’s analysis reveals a prophetic voice who often spoke of environmental destruction and overpopulation. While Jeffers warns that both religion and science are flawed, offering no salvation from human cruelty and inhumanity, he also shows that opening one’s heart and mind to the larger world of nature can offer moments of enlightenment. Although Karman’s colorless introduction lacks the vibrant energy of his subject’s work, it could very well lead a reader to pick up Jeffers’s poetry again or for the first time. (Aug.)