Though famous in his time, Robinson Jeffers is a little known writer these days. A Californian poet raised in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh). He chose to build his home on the cliffs looking over the Pacific.
Between the world wars he was a relatively celebrated literary figure, but he fell from grace after inferring admiration toward Hitler’s Germany during the nineteen-thirties. His reputation never recovered from this, though after his death, his efforts to protect the natural world would mark him out as an early environmentalist pioneer.
Looking at his works I think it’s fair to say he was no fascist. If he was I wouldn’t care how beautiful his poems were, I would want nothing to do with him. Instead I’d say he was fascinated by the shifting fates of empires rising and falling from the detached artistic eye.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing but many people admired the strange rebirth of Germany in the thirties and neglected to see the danger signs straight away. It’s fair to say Jeffers found himself on the wrong side of history, as did many both on the right and left in America and we must remember a great many writers admired Stalin until his crimes became clear.
I found his poetry by accident, and discovered in it a jagged beauty. He is an artful nature writer, rooted in the earth and moved by the Pacific tides. His words are sculptured by the power of nature very much as the Californian cliffs on which he built his family home.
The wilds, the red woods and the expanse of barely civilized wilderness characterize his creative worlds.
I am not a fan of his longer works but very much his short pieces. He cut a path to a style of writing which would become familiar to modern poets.
His works point to later american writers, Bukowski, Writing at a time of transition, the literary world was shaking off the lingering influence of Victorian era poetic forms.
He forged in his poems an accessible style, pointed to later american writers, Bukowski, the Beatniks, and the twentieth century greats that came after.
Jeffers has refreshing clarity, while allowing the abstract to inform of underlying meaning.
He shared clips from his daily life, fragments as analogies for larger themes and provided us with open spaces to imbue our own interpretation.
I gain much from this style of writing, striking me as authentic life, experienced in flashes of sensation, unconnected moments that may have no obvious purpose or meaning, beginning or end but in observing them.
Maybe one day Jeffers will return into fashion, but fashion was the least of his concerns and somewhat selfishly, it’s a good feeling to know I have discovered his work where still others have not.
He refers back to Indian and christian mythology, rooting his work in nature and ultimately mans insignificance when faced with the might and magnificence of a natural world which we pass through and indeed are
The vastness of time that came before us and the boundless length which lays ahead, a poet like Jeffers marks that journey beyond the limits of a single persons life and the art he created, still pours forth a fresh from its truthful source.
The vastness of time that came before us and the boundless length which lays ahead, a poet like Jeffers marks that journey beyond the limits of a single persons life and the art he created, still pours forth a fresh from its truthful source.
In his short works I read flashes of later american writers, Bukowski, the Beatniks, and the immediacy of poetry from the second half of the twentieth century.
He remains in my personal top-five greatest poets. His words bare a cutting edge, built of his own labors as his boulder house still does high on the Californian cliffs.
LIGHT ON LIGHT 