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The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers
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Product Description
Now scholars are at last beginning to recognize that he created a significant alternative to the High Modernism of Pound, Eliot, and Stevens. Similarly, contemporary poets who have returned to the narrative poem acknowledge Jeffers to be a major poet, while those exploring California and the American West as literary regions have found in him a foundational figure. Moreover, Jeffers stands as a crucial precursor to contemporary attempts to rethink our practical, ethical, and spiritual obligations to the natural world and the environment.
These developments underscore the need for a new selected edition that would, like the 1938 volume, include the long narratives that were to Jeffers his major work, along with the more easily anthologized shorter poems. This new selected edition differs from its predecessor in several ways. When Jeffers shaped the 1938 Selected Poetry, he drew from his most productive period (1917-37), but his career was not over yet. In the quarter century that followed, four more volumes of his poetry were published. This new selected edition draws from these later volumes, and it includes a sampling of the poems Jeffers left unpublished, along with several prose pieces in which he reflects on his poetry and poetics.
This edition also adopts the texts of the recently completed The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (five volumes, Stanford, 1988-2000). When the poems were originally published, copy editors and typesetters adjusted Jeffers’s punctuation, often obscuring the rhythm and pacing of what he actually wrote, and at points even obscuring meaning and nuance. This new selected edition, then, is a much broader, more accurate representation of Jeffers’s career than the previous Selected Poetry.
Reviews of volumes in
The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers
“A masterful job of contemporary scholarly editing, this book begins an edition intended to clarify a ‘Jeffers canon,’ establishing for times to come the verse legacy of a poet who looked on all things with the eyes of eternity.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“This edition will be standard . . . a tribute and justice to a poet whose independent strength has survived to challenge personal and public canons.”—Virginia Quarterly Review
“Jeffers is the last of the major poets of his generation—Frost, Stevens, Williams, Pound, Moore, Eliot—to get his collected poems. Now that the job is at hand, it is done very well. . . . Tim Hunt has been painstaking in his editorial preparation and judicious in his presentation. . . . A great poet is ready for his due.”—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Few American poets are treated as well by publishers as Jeffers is by Stanford University Press. . . . These poems represent a distinctive voice in the American canon, and it is good to have them so wonderfully set forth.”—Christian Century
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #131995 in Books
- Published on: 2002-04-01
- Released on: 2001-03-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 758 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
In the 1920s, on the strength of Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, Jeffers's critical reputation rivaled those of Frost and Eliotwhile the relatively frank sexual material to be found in his long, rough-hewn, often Callifornia-based narratives didn't hurt his popular reputation, as Washington State University professor Hunt notes in his introduction. After hitting the cover of Time in 1935, Jeffers (1887-1962) made a selection from his work three years later for Random House, one that has been listed as "out of stock indefinitely" for the last few years. A much more modest Random selected edition published a few years after Jeffers's death remains in print in paper, but this huge selection, culled from the monumental five-volume collected edition Hunt has edited for Stanford, is much more comprehensive, and can claim improved textual accuracy. Hunt's edition strips the punctuation added by contemporary printers (which "often obscures the rhythm and pacing of what Jeffers actually wrote, and at points even obscures meaning and nuance") and includes a carefully weighed choice of long and short works, as well as unpublished work. Jeffers's serious and sometimes morally indignant parables have most recently been taken up by Dana Gioia and others as a bulwark against Pound-and-Eliot-line modernism. This new selection will get readers closer than ever to the poems as Jeffers himself saw them, reacquainting them with "the night-wind veering, the smell of the spilt wine," and allowing readers to place him on their own. (Apr. 26) Forecast: While this selection is clearly intended to replace the Random edition, some readers may still prefer the poet's own selection (which could be provoked back into print), though this set will now have the edge on syllabi and in libraries. Further Jeffers projects from Stanford include Volume Five of The Collected Poetry, which will complete the project, slated for August, and Stones of the Sur, a book of lush Carmel coast photos by Morley Baer matched with appropriate Jeffers poems, which arrives from the press in June ($60 160p ISBN 0-8047-3942-0).
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
The somber and violent long-lined narratives of Robinson Jeffers remained so popular for so long that his Selected Poetry (1938) was in print for more than 50 years. It lacked any of the quarter-century's worth of poems Jeffers wrote after its publication, and even before it went out of print, Jeffers' reputation was reviving, thanks to younger poets who acknowledged his influence, such as Mark Jarman, and older poets of great prominence, such as Czeslaw Milosz, who testified to his power. Hence this volume that selects from all his work is most welcome. Besides poems from Jeffers' four post-1938 collections, five prose pieces Jeffers wrote about his poetry and 13 unpublished poems add nearly 200 pages to the size of the 1938 volume. The only significant works Hunt doesn't cull from are The Women at Point Sur (1927), the longest and, Hunt says, "most ambitious, complex, and difficult" of Jeffers' narratives, and the Euripidean adaptation, Medea (1946). A volume for the core of American literature collections. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
All The Little Hoofprints
The Answer
Ante Mortem
Antrim
Apology For Bad Dreams
An Artist
At The Birth Of An Age
At The Fall Of An Age
Autumn Evening
Ave Caesar
The Beaks Of Eagles
The Bed By The Window
The Bird With The Dark Plumes In My Blood
Birds
Birth-dues
Blind Horses
Boats In A Fog
The Broadstone; Near Finvoy, County Antrim
The Broken Balance
By Day And Night Dream About Happy Death
The Caged Eagle's Death Dream
The Coast-road
Continent's End
The Cruel Falcon
Crumbs Or The Loaf
Crumbs Or The Loaf
The Cycle
The Dead To Clemenceau: November, 1929
Decaying Lambskins
Delusion Of Saints
Distant Rainfall
Divinely Superfluous Beauty
Evening Ebb
Fawn's Foster-mother
Fire On The Hills
Flight Of Swans
Fog
Ghosts In England
The Giant's Ring: Ballylesson, Near Belfast
Give Your Heart To The Hawks
Going To Horse Flats
Granite And Cypress
Gray Weather
The Great Sunset
Hands
Hellenistics
Hooded Night
Hope Is Not For The Wise
Hurt Hawks
In The Hill At New Grange; Burial Ground On River Boyne
Inscription For A Gravestone
Intellectuals
Iona: The Graves Of The Kings
Joy
Life From The Lifeless
A Little Scraping
Love The Wild Swan
The Loving Sheperdess
The Low Sky
The Maid's Thought
Margrave
Meditation On Saviors
Natural Music
New Mexican Mountain
New Year's Eve
Night
Night Without Sleep
No Resurrection
Nova
November Surf
Now Returned Home
Oh, Lovely Rock
The Old Man's Dream After He Died
Ossian's Grave; Prehistoric Monument Near Cushendall
People And A Heron
Phenomena
The Place For No Story
Point Joe
Post Mortem
Praise Life
The Purse-seine
Rearmament
A Redeemer
Return
Roan Stallion
Rock And Hawk
Salmon-fishing
Science
Second-best
Self-criticism In February
Shakespeare's Grave
Shane O'neill's Cairn
Shine, Perishing Republic
Shine, Republic
Shiva
Shooting Season; In The North Of Scotland
Signpost
Soliloquy
The Songs Of The Dead Men To Three Dancers: 1. To Desire
The Songs Of The Dead Men To Three Dancers: 2. To Death
The Songs Of The Dead Men To Three Dancers: 3. To Victory
Steelhead
Still The Mind Smiles At Its Own Rebellions
Subjected Earth
Suicide's Stone
Summer Holiday
Tamar
Thebaid
Theory Of Truth
Thurso's Landing
To His Father
To The Stone-cutters
Tor House
The Tower Beyond Tragedy
The Trap
The Treasure
Triad
The Truce And The Peace (november, 1918)
What Are Cities For?
Where I?
The Wind-struck Music
Winged Rock
Wise Men In Their Bad Hours Have Envied
The Women At Point Sur: 12
Woodrow Wilson (february, 1924)
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
Customer Reviews
A Carmel Poet
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 misanthropy: humans are atoms to be split.
Some of my favorite poems are here: "Shine, Perishing Republic," "Boats in a Fog," "Carmel Point," "Divine Superfluous Beauty," "Tower Beyond Tragedy," "Bed by the Window," "Una," "The Deer Lay Down Their Bones," and even some of his last writing. I remember a certain Shakespeare class in which I read "Shine, Perishing Republic" on the day after the LA riots.
Robert Hass (UC Berkeley), C. Milosz (Emeritus, UC Berkeley), and William Everson have been poet champions of Jeffers' work. But one scholar, in particular, has dedicated his academic life to understanding that creative pulse, which inspired Jeffers to his pen. That notable scholar is Robert J. Brophy.
I highly recommend this anthology. I also recommend the scholarship of Robert Brophy. I can say with pleasure and esteem that I have benefited from his scholarship and literature courses at Cal State U., Long Beach. Bob Brophy introduced me to Jeffers (via a Jeffers course and a Tor House tour, 10/91); I have introduced Jeffers and his work to my own students, and I will forever be touched by his gentle, guiding hand.
The Inhumanist
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 Whitman's long line, though failed to produce his sonic effects) stands as one of the finest poetic figures in neo-Romantic Modernism. His radical philosophy, which he called Inhumanism, is actually an attempt to totally think anew human conceptions regarding the nature and humanity, and is far too selective, complex, affirmative and far-reaching to be dismissed as simple misanthropy. It is for this reason that Jeffers's work has generated a vortex of academic dissent. The adage that "all great religions began as heresies" may receive sufficient demonstration in Jeffers' future critical reception. In this connection, it may be tempting to see Jeffers as another Prometheus, a seeker and bringer of Truth and Fire. His Inhumanism is a bold and powerful attempt to ennoble humanity through greater knowledge and self-scrutiny.
timely
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.
