![]() ![]() No American poet seems more tightly bound to a fixed landscape than he to the California coast. Instead, love thy environment, Jeffers urged. Love thy neighbor? Not too much not too well. At the close to perhaps his most famous poem, ''Shine, Perishing Republic,'' the chilly advice he offers his twin sons is typical:Īnd boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever There are hints here of an irreverence bordering on blasphemy - confirming Jeffers's kinship with the Blake who wrote the proverbs of hell, or the Ambrose Bierce of ''The Devil's Dictionary.'' Although Jeffers liked to fulminate no less than any old-time preacher, and though his message shook with fire and brimstone (the death of humankind was a recurrent theme), he was forever subverting the Christian edicts of his upbringing. There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that Will remain when there is no heart to break for it. Though joy is better than sorrow joy is not great He might well have stood in a high pulpit when delivering lines like these: Like his father, Jeffers delivered sermons. He foreswore most forms of community life, avoiding civilization as ''the enemy of man'' and a ''transient sickness.''Īlternatively, one could see Jeffers's career as vindication of the notion that the fruit - including the biblical fruit of the Tree of Knowledge - doesn't fall far from the tree. In his teens, Jeffers became involved with Una Kuster, the wife of a prominent Los Angeles attorney, and the relationship resulted in her scandalous divorce and eventual marriage to Jeffers in 1913, when he was 26. His father, a Presbyterian minister, cannot have taken much pleasure in the feckless, hopeless, often infuriating, Bible-quoting old men who peopled so many of his son's poems, or in the work's raw, often violent sexuality. One could view Jeffers's long career - his first book was published, privately, in 1912, his last, posthumously, in 1963 - as a repudiation of his staid background. ![]() It heartened and inspired him, as he stared out to sea, to think that he was contemplating a vast emptiness, an expanse where people are ''few enough.'' He spent almost the whole of his professional life in Carmel, Calif., in a stone cottage he himself had largely constructed. Robinson Jeffers perched upon what he clearly liked to think of as the edge of the world and wrote poems.
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