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Life
1887-1962 [John Robinson Jeffers]; American poet, b. Pittsburgh, Penn., son of a Presbyternian minister who took him to Europe where he received schooling in Germany and Switzerland, learning German and French there; returned to the USA in 1902, already a budding poet; studed at Occidental Coll., LA; and later USC; first in literature and then in medicine; involved in a love-affair with Una Call Koster, the wife of an attorney who married Jeffers on the day she divorced Koster in 1913; prevented from reaching England by World War and settled at Carmel-Big Sur (California) where he built Tor House, a stone cottage [‘prow and plunging cutwater’], with an small inheritance; single-handedly built Hawk Tower, an iconic 40-ft structure, completed in 1925; published Tamar and Other Poems (1924), turning on an adaption of the Electra-Orestes story; his next collection, Women of Point Sur (1927), was panned by critics;
Cawdor (1928), and Dear Jesus (1929) rebuilt his reputation; travelled in the British Isles with Una and their 12 year-old twin sons Donnan and Garth during seven months in 1929, staying chiefly in the Glens of Antrim (N. Ireland) where they rented Dromore Cottage at Knocknacarry, in the Glens of Antrim - a decision which reflecting his wife’s ancestral feelings for Ireland; his next collection, Descent to the Dead (1930) which shows a depressive turn and his later poetry was marked by growing bitterness at world leaders which alienated him from the American establishment of the day; the couple revisited Ireland in 1948 but Jeffers suffered pleurisy and nearly died there; Una was diagnosed with cancer soon after and died by suicide in 1950; Jeffers went on to publish Hungerfield (1954), a tribute to her followed only by a posthumous collection as The Beginning and the End (1963); d. 20 Jan. in Carmel, California; Tor House is open to the public.
| The travel diaries of the Jeffers family in 1929 - including contributions by parents and children - were published by Una Jeffers as Visits to Ireland (LA: Ward Richie Press 1954; Tor House Press 2022), 212pp. |
Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is —Robinson Jeffers |
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Criticism
Fraser Drew, ‘Carmel and Cushendun: The Irish Influence on Robinson Jeffers’, in Éire-Ireland, 3, 2 (Summer 1968), pp.72-82; C. L. Dallat, ‘Foundation Stones: Robinson Jeffers and Poetry in the North of Ireland’, in The Hopkins Review, 10:3 (Johns Hopkins UP Summer 2017), pp.413-30 [see extract].
| C. L. Dallat, ‘Foundation Stones: Robinson Jeffers and Poetry in the North of Ireland’, in The Hopkins Review, 10:3 (Johns Hopkins UP Summer 2017), pp.413-30. |
He also manages to play a significant part in excavating the landscape that was to become “poetry from the North of Ireland,” one of the most overexamined literary categories of recent years for a host of reasons, only to have his role in that renaissance quietly, and surely not deliberately, ignored all over again. The work he created over a wet summer in a tiny cottage in the Glens of Antrim in 1929 is easily identifiable: so the failure to probe its influence on that region’s leading poets of the ensuing 40 years is indeed striking, but easily rectified. |
| —Available at Muse - online; password required - accessed 26.08.2023. |
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References
British Library Catalogue lists numerous works and commentaries on the life and writings of this prominent Anglo-American poet, as protegé of the Woolf’s and later a distinguished Californian man of letters - at one time pseud. ‘The Inhumanist’ - including Una Jeffers, Visits to Ireland, foreword Robinson Jeffares (1954).
There is an entry on John Robinson Jeffers in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
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