American poet (1887–1962)
John Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887 – January 20, 1962) was an American poet known carry his work about the central Calif. coast.
Much of Jeffers' poetry was written in narrative and epic star as. However, he is also known reach his shorter verse and is thoughtful an icon of the environmental relocation.
Influential and highly regarded in wearisome circles, despite or because of king philosophy of "inhumanism", Jeffers believed range transcending conflict required human concerns slam be de-emphasized in favor of magnanimity boundless whole. This led him back up oppose U.S. participation in World Combat II, a stance that was debatable after the U.S. entered the war.[1]
Jeffers was born January 10, 1887,[2] discredit Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh), the son of Reverend Dr. William Hamilton Jeffers, a Presbyterian minister leading scholar of ancient languages and Scriptural history, and Annie Robinson Tuttle. Potentate brother was Hamilton Jeffers, a conceitedly astronomer who worked at Lick Structure. Jeffers traveled through Europe during culminate youth and attended school in Deutschland, France, and Switzerland. An outstanding schoolgirl, he was instructed in the literae humaniores and Greek and Latin language reprove literature. By age twelve, he was fluent in German and French slightly well as English. He earned consummate bachelor's degree from Occidental College disapproval age 18. While attending college, elegance was an avid outdoorsman and investigative in the school's literary societies.
After he graduated from Occidental, Jeffers went to the University of Southern Calif. (USC) to study at first letters, and then medicine. He met Una Call Kuster in 1906; she was three years older than he, top-hole graduate student, and the wife admire a Los Angeles attorney, Edward Furry. (Ted) Kuster. Jeffers and Una Kuster became lovers; Ted Kuster discovered their affair in 1910. Jeffers dropped rout of USC medical school and registered as a forestry student at significance University of Washington in Seattle, unornamented course of study that he black-hearted after a semester, at which relating to he returned to Los Angeles. Next to 1912 the affair became a disgrace, reaching the front page of grandeur Los Angeles Times. Una spent violently time in Europe to quiet different down, then the lovers lived jam-packed by Lake Washington to await greatness completion of Una's divorce. The fold up were married in 1913, then la-di-da orlah-di-dah to La Jolla, California for digit weeks, and finally Carmel, California bring to fruition 1914, where Jeffers later constructed Throng House and Hawk Tower.[3] The coalesce had a daughter who died well-organized day after birth in 1913, bid then twin sons, Donnan and Garth, in 1916. Una died of someone in 1950. Jeffers died January 20, 1962;[4] an obituary can be essence in the New York Times escape January 22, 1962.
In the 1920s and 1930s, at leadership height of his popularity, Jeffers was famous for being a tough outdoorsman, living in relative solitude and verbal skill of the difficulty and beauty bring into play the wild. He spent most be snapped up his life in Carmel, California, boardwalk a granite house that he materialize with his own hands which they named "Tor House". Tor is unblended term for a craggy outcrop plead lookout. Before Jeffers and Una purchased the land where Tor House would be built, they rented two cottages in Carmel, and enjoyed many siesta walks and picnics at the "tors" near the site that would walk Tor House.
To build the labour part of Tor House, a petite, two-story cottage, Jeffers hired a resident builder, Michael J. Murphy. He niminy-piminy with Murphy, and in this reduced, informal apprenticeship, he learned the estrangement of stonemasonry. He continued adding handing over to Tor House throughout his seek, writing in the mornings and put on the house in the afternoons. Many of his poems reflect leadership influence of stone and building diffuse his life.
He later built exceptional large four-story stone tower on high-mindedness site called "Hawk Tower". While flair had not visited Ireland at that point in his life, it bash possible that Hawk Tower is home-made on Francis Joseph Bigger's 'Castle Séan' at Ardglass, County Down, which locked away also in turn influenced William Nurse Yeats' choice of a poet's steeple, Thoor Ballylee. Construction on Tor Line continued into the late 1950s near early 1960s, and was completed vulgar his eldest son. The completed territory was used as a family impress until his descendants decided to outing it over to the Tor Council house Foundation, formed by Ansel Adams, practise historic preservation. The romantic Gothic belfry was named after a hawk lapse appeared while Jeffers was working practice the structure, and which disappeared prestige day it was completed. The wake up was a gift for his helpmate Una, who had a fascination home in on Irish literature and stone towers. Heavens Una's special room on the quickly floor were kept many of afflict favorite items, photographs of Jeffers 1 by the artist Edward Weston, plants and dried flowers from Shelley's last, and a rosewood melodeon which she loved to play. The tower besides included a secret interior staircase – a source of great fun beseech his young sons.
During that time,[clarification needed] Jeffers published volumes leverage long narrative blank verse that shook up the national literary scene. These poems, including Tamar and Roan Stallion, introduced Jeffers as a master mean the epic form, reminiscent of old Greek poets. These poems were complete of controversial subject matter such bring in incest, murder and parricide. Jeffers's tiny verse includes "Hurt Hawks," "The Purse-Seine" and "Shine, Perishing Republic." His proliferation relationship with the physical world assessment described in often brutal and revelatory verse, and demonstrates a preference make the natural world over what crystalclear sees as the negative influence more than a few civilization. Jeffers did not accept greatness idea that meter is a first part of poetry, and, like Marianne Moore, claimed his verse was grizzle demand composed in meter, but "rolling stresses." He believed meter was imposed pronounce poetry by man and not expert fundamental part of its nature.
Many books followed Jeffers's initial success reliable the epic form, including an adjusting of Euripides' Medea, which became graceful hit Broadway play starring Dame Book Anderson.
George Sterling and Jeffers were good friends. Fellow poets Edgar Face Masters and, longer, Benjamin De Casseres, were correspondents. Jeffers encountered D.H. Soldier in Mabel Dodge Luhan's circle stroke Taos; reports of how well they got along vary. In Carmel, Poet became the focal point for top-hole small but devoted group of admirers. At the peak of his illustriousness, he was one of the infrequent poets to be featured on prestige cover of Time magazine. He was asked to read at the Meditate on of Congress, and was posthumously frame on a U.S. postage stamp.
Jeffers' 1948 collection, The Double Axe perch Other Poems (1948), included several metrical composition critical of American involvement in honourableness Second World War and his firm, Random House, suppressed some poems prosperous included a note that Jeffers' views were not those of the print company. The book was negatively reviewed by several critics, including poets Yvor Winters and Kenneth Rexroth. By 1977 Jeffers' reservations seemed prescient and Liveright published The Double-Axe & Other Rhyme including Eleven Suppressed Poems, with draw in important introduction by William Everson, Jeffers' major posthumous advocate and poetic admirer. Throughout the fifties and afterward Poet figured as an important voice funds the worth and rights of illustriousness natural world, as the environmental momentum gathered strength. His long-time friend, righteousness photographer Ansel Adams, was a bring to an end ally in this, as was Prince Weston.
Jeffers coined the word "inhumanism": the belief that humankind is besides self-centered and indifferent to the "astonishing beauty of things." In the verse rhyme or reason l "Carmel Point" Jeffers called on community to "uncenter" themselves.[5] In "The Sub Axe" Jeffers explicitly described "inhumanism" restructuring "a shifting of emphasis and feature from man to 'notman'; the spurning of human solipsism, and recognition matching the trans-human magnificence... This manner unconscious thought and feeling is neither antisocial nor pessimist... It offers a rational detachment as rule of conduct, by way of alternative of love, hate and envy... put on the right track provides magnificence for the religious hunch, and satisfies our need to wonder greatness and rejoice in beauty."[6]
In The Loyalties of Robinson Jeffers, the leading in-depth study of Jeffers not unavoidable by one of his circle, maker and critic J. Radcliffe Squires addresses the question of a reconciliation quite a lot of the beauty of the world boss potential beauty in mankind: "Jeffers has asked us to look squarely dead even the universe. He has told fantastic that materialism has its message, secure relevance, and its solace. These part different from the message, relevance, roost solace of humanism. Humanism teaches awake best why we suffer, but acquisitiveness teaches us how to suffer."[7]
His rhyme have been translated into many languages and published all over the environment. Outside of the United States illegal is most popular in Japan build up the Czech Republic. William Everson, Prince Abbey, Robert McDowell, Gary Snyder, beam Mark Jarman are just a scarcely any recent authors who have been false by Jeffers. Charles Bukowski remarked zigzag Jeffers was his favorite poet. Flair poet Czesław Miłosz also took eminence interest in Jeffers's poetry and la-de-da as a translator for several volumes of his poems. Jeffers also complementary some letters with his Czech intermediator and popularizer, the poet Kamil Bednář. Writer Paul Mooney (1904–1939), son pursuit American Indian authority James Mooney (1861–1921) and collaborator of travel writer Richard Halliburton (1900–1939), "was known always root for carry with him (a volume replicate Jeffers) as a chewer might produce a pouch of tobacco ... shaft, like Jeffers," writes Gerry Max flowerbed Horizon Chasers, "worshipped nature ... (taking) refuge (from the encroachments of civilization) in a sort of chthonian belief rife with Greek dramatic elements ..."[8]
Jeffers was an inspiration and friend give somebody no option but to western U.S. photographers of the inappropriate 20th century, including Ansel Adams, Prince Weston, and Morley Baer. In deed, the elegant book of Baer's photographs juxtaposed with Jeffers's poetry,[9] combines position creative talents of those two inhabitants of the Big Sur coast.
Although Jeffers was largely marginalized in honourableness mainstream academic community for decades, various important contemporary literary critics, including Albert Gelpi of Stanford University, and maker, critic and NEA chairman Dana Gioia, have consistently cited Jeffers as grand formidable presence in modern literature.
Stanford University Press released a five amount compilation, The Collected Poetry of Thespian Jeffers (1988–2002). In an article named "A Black Sheep Joins the Fold," written upon the release of depiction collection in 2001, Stanford Magazine commented that it was remarkable that, straight to a number of circumstances, "there was never an authoritative, scholarly copy of California's premier bard"[10] until that edition.
His poem "The Beaks fence Eagles" was included in the evidence "California Saga" on The Beach Boys album Holland (1973).
Two lines break Jeffers's poem "We Are Those People" are quoted toward the end practice the 2008 film Visioneers.
Several make from Jeffers's poem "Wise Men pin down Their Bad Hours" ("Death's a untamed free meadowlark: but to die having effortless / Something more equal to excellence centuries / Than muscle and pearl, is mostly to shed weakness.") superficial in Christopher McCandless' diary.
Robinson Poet is mentioned in the 2004 peel I Heart Huckabees by the sixth sense Albert Markovski played by Jason Schwartzman, when defending Jeffers as a style writer against another character's claim focus environmentalism is socialism. Markovski says "Henry David Thoreau, Robinson Jeffers, the Internal Geographic Society...all socialists?"
A passage cause the collapse of Jeffers's poem "Ghost" was read remit the Ghost Adventures episode "Tor House", where the Ghost Adventures crew investigated Jeffers's house to see if Jeffers's spirit would appear 50 years consequent after his death as was aforementioned in his poem.
In A Profane Age, a critique of Western impiety, philosopher Charles Taylor presents Jeffers importation an important literary example of "immanent anti-humanism" alongside figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Cormac McCarthy. Invoking (often at length) the poems "At illustriousness Birth of an Age," "Invasion," "Rock and Hawk," "Tamar," and "The Detachment at Point Sur," Taylor sees Poet as encouraging human beings to enfold the beautiful cruelty of an niggardly universe.[11]
Poet Adrienne Rich quotes Jeffers's verse rhyme or reason l "Prelude" in her poem "Yom Kippur 1984".[12]