The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Robinson Jeffers

His Unusual Legacy From Tamar to The Double Axe

Jul 24, 2009

Tor House, a stone cottage at land's end in Carmel, California, was built by Robinson Jeffers with his own two hands and became the place where he died.

Jeffers passed away in his sleep at this curious home on January 20, 1962, leaving behind one of the most parabolic careers in literary history. Once compared to the Greek tragedians, his reputation has gone through a rise, fall, and modest comeback that befit the ocean waves he so often describes in his verse.

Early Success

When Jeffers first arrived to the literary scene, there was everything to indicate lifelong success and few, if any, signs of critical backlash that would tear his reputation down. During the early 1910s, while a university student and advancing his relationship with soon-to-be wife Una Kuster, Jeffers was writing poetry in a fairly traditional, late-romantic manner that graced his two collections Flagons and Apples (1912) and Californians (1916).

By 1924, when he published Tamar and Other Poems, Jeffers had settled with Una on the Pacific coast, had built Tor House, and was writing in a long, sweeping line reminiscent of Walt Whitman. Tamar and Other Poems, though having a small run from vanity publisher Peter G. Boyle of New York, drew major critical notice. It was praised by leading writers, including T. S. Eliot and Mark Van Doren, and established Jeffers as one of the leading younger poets in America.

So popular did the Tamar collection become that it was issued as an expanded volume, Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems, by Boni & Liveright in 1925. His triumphs continued through 1932, having just published Thurso’s Landing and Other Poems; Jeffers was widely known to the general public, often considered as the nation’s best poet of any age group, and was seen on the cover of Time Magazine, a rare honor given to verse-writers.

Loss of Popularity

Before the Second World War’s outbreak, Jeffers was no stranger to controversy and unafraid to speak his mind. In long poems such as Tamar, whose incest theme is drawn from the Old Testament story of King David’s daughter, and brief works like ‘Shine, Perishing Republic’ that ridicule the decadence of American life, Jeffers presented his social and political views with harsh focus and clarity.

This never seemed to harm Jeffers’s reception amongst critics and the public; in fact, it seemed to be welcomed. But after World War II ended and the Cold War began, Jeffers’s own philosophies and the popular view of what was ‘okay’ in literature began to diverge. When he published the highly political Be Angry at the Sun in 1941, there were already murmurs in the background. Poet Stanley Kunitz, for instance, warned Jeffers that he needed to support the common cause before he found himself pushed to the margin.

Jeffers, economically self-sufficient and content with the house he built at Carmel, was never to be swayed. He had witnessed far too much human stupidity in one lifetime to change his mind. Jeffers’s caustic views of mankind - the life-form that wasted millions of innocents during two World Wars and seemed bent on destruction through science, political fanaticism, and religious hysteria - finished off his popularity altogether with The Double Axe and Other Poems in 1948.

The volume's title poem, divided into two sections, advances his concept of ‘Inhumanism,’ a philosophy that calls for man to turn outward from his self-centered ways and embrace the glorious, all-encompassing natural world. It also portrays modern man as inherently corrupt, even demented, and ends with the protagonist happily rising at dawn to the red sky of a nuclear holocaust.

Other poems in The Double Axe collection are angry responses to the Second World War. Jeffers saw the war as a vast game played between egomaniacs who fill seats of power, with the ignorant masses more than happy to play along. Jeffers doesn’t hesitate to place Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Truman on equally corrupt footing. 'Pearl Harbor,' the volume’s first poem, builds on numerous other verses in which Jeffers foresaw the rise and undoing of America as a world power:

Jeffers opposed American entrance into the Second World War, as The Double Axe and Other Poems made clear in 1948. Portions of the volume were deemed so offensive by Jeffers’s publisher Random House that entire poems were removed, others were edited, and a disclaimer was added to separate the company from their poet. The raw, often violent themes used by Jeffers and his atypical political feelings were too much for readers in the ‘embalmed’ postwar era to swallow.

Critical and popular reactions were brutal and Jeffers sank into obscurity with rapid speed. Time, the very magazine that pasted Jeffers on its cover, went as far as to call The Double Axe ‘a necrophilic nightmare.’ Even the success behind Jeffers’s staged adaptation of Medea just one year earlier was completely forgotten.

Fall into Obscurity

After the death of Una in 1950, Jeffers became more and more reclusive and wrote increasingly less. By the time a final collection, The Beginning and the End and Other Poems, was released posthumously in 1963, his name had vanished from literary discussion. Jeffers was remembered by only a select few who kept his legacy alive, often for the epic verses and depictions of the natural world he wrote before 1940, and is now seeing a gradual rebirth of popularity.

His drastic rise and fall has been seldom, if ever, charted in world literature and, as many of his brutal prophecies become true, we may witness an equally drastic revival.

The copyright of the article The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Robinson Jeffers in American Poetry is owned by Paul-John Ramos. Permission to republish The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Robinson Jeffers in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.