Robinson Jeffers

At 75 years old, Robinson Jeffers physical status not available right now. We will update Robinson Jeffers's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

John Robinson Jeffers (January 10, 1887 – January 20, 1962) was an American poet best known for his writing about the central California coast.

Much of Jeffers' poetry was published in narrative and epic form.

However, he is also known for his shorter verse and is regarded as a representative of the environmental movement.

Jeffers, who was influential and well-known in some circles, believed that despite or because of his conviction of "inhumanism," conflict was de-emphasized in favour of the boundless whole.

He came to oppose the United States' participation in World War II, a position that was divisive after the United States first intervened the war.

Life

Jeffers was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, the son of Reverend Dr. William Hamilton Jeffers, a Presbyterian minister and scholar of ancient languages and Biblical history, and Annie Robinson Tuttle. Hamilton Jeffers, a well-known astronomer who worked at Lick Observatory, was his brother. During his youth, Jeffers travelled through Europe and attended classes in Germany, France, and Switzerland. He was trained in classical, Greek, and Latin language and literature, making him an outstanding student. He was fluent in German and French as well as English by age twelve. At the age of 18, he received his bachelor's degree from Occidental College. He was an avid outdoorsman and active in the school's literary clubs while attending college.

Jeffers, who graduated from Occidental, went to the University of Southern California (USC) to study first literature and then medicine. Una Call Kuster was born in 1906; she was three years older than he, a graduate student, and the wife of a Los Angeles attorney Edward G. (Ted) Kuster. Jeffers and Una Kuster became lovers; Ted Kuster discovered their affair in 1910. Jeffers dropped out of USC medical school and enrolled as a forestry student at the University of Washington in Seattle, a course that he abandoned after a semester, during which time he returned to Los Angeles. The affair became a scandal by 1912, when it appeared on the Los Angeles Times' front page. Una stayed in Europe for a time to relax, and then the two friends gathered in Lake Washington to await the completion of Una's divorce. The two were married in 1913, then moved to La Jolla, California, for six weeks, and then to Carmel, California, where Jeffers later added Tor House and Hawk Tower. Donnan and Garth, the couple's twin sons, died a day after birth in 1913, and then twin sons Donnan and Garth in 1916. In 1950, Una died of cancer. Jeffers died on January 20, 1962; an obituary can be found in the New York Times from January 22, 1962.

Source

Poetic career

Jeffers was known as a tough outdoorsman in the 1920s and 1930s, living in relative anonymity and writing about the danger and beauty of the wild. He spent the majority of his life in Carmel, California, in a granite house that he carved with his own hands and dubbed "Tor House." Tor is a word that refers to a craggy outcrop or a lookout. Before Jeffers and Una bought the property on which Tor House would be built, they rented two cottages in Carmel and enjoyed many afternoon walks and picnics at the "tors" site, which would become Tor House.

Jeffers recruited Michael J. Murphy, a local builder, to build Tor House, a small, two-story cottage. He worked with Murphy, and in this short, informal apprenticeship, he learned the art of stonemasonry. He continued contributing to Tor House through his life, writing in the mornings and helping in the afternoons. Many of his poems reflect the influence of stone and building on his life.

On the site, he later built "Hawk Tower," a massive four-story stone tower. Although Hawk Tower is not based on Francis Joseph Bigger's 'Castle Séan' at Ardglass, County Down, which in turn inspired William Butler Yeats' choice of a poet's tower, Thoor Ballylee. Tor House's construction began in the late 1950s and early 1960s and was completed by his eldest son. The completed home was used as a family home until his descendants decided to turn it over to the Tor House Foundation, which was established by Ansel Adams for historic preservation. The romantic Gothic tower was named after a hawk who appeared while Jeffers was building the building but later died the day it was finished. Una, who had a penchant for Irish literature and stone towers, received the tower as a gift from his wife. Many of her favorite pieces, photographs of Jeffers taken by the artist Weston, plants and dried flowers from Shelley's grave, as well as a rosewood melodeon which she adored to play were displayed in Una's second floor special room. The tower also had a dark interior staircase, which provided a lot of amusement for his young boys.

Jeffers released volumes of long narrative blank verse during this period, which stunned the national literary scene. Jeffers was introduced as a master of the epic form by these poems, which were reminiscent of ancient Greek poets. These poems were brimming with controversial topics such as incest, murder, and parricide. "Hurt Hawks," "The Purse-Seine," and "Shine, Perishing Republic" are three Jeffers' short verses. In a largely brutal and apocalyptic book, his intense relationship with the physical world is depicted, showing a preference for the natural world over civilization's negative influence. Jeffers refused to accept the fact that meter is a fundamental part of poetry, and as Marianne Moore, his poem was not composed in meter but "rolling stresses." He believed the meter was applied to poetry by man rather than by a specific feature of the process.

Many books followed Jeffers' debut in the epic form, including an adaptation of Euripides' Medea, which became a hit Broadway play starring Dame Judith Anderson.

George Sterling and Jeffers were good friends. Edgar Lee Masters and, later, Benjamin De Casseres, were correspondents. Jeffers in Mabel Dodge Luhan's circle in Taos met D.H. Lawrence; the way they got along differ. Jeffers, who lived in Carmel, became the focal point for a small but faithful group of admirers. He was one of the few poets to be featured on the front cover of Time magazine at the time of his fame. He was asked to read at the Library of Congress and was posthumously introduced a US postage stamp.

Many poems describing American involvement in the Second World War and his publisher, Random House, were deleted altogether, with a note that Jeffers' views were not those of the publishing company. Several commentators, including poets Yvor Winters and Kenneth Rexroth, had sluggishly critiqued the book. Jeffers' reservations were prescient, and Liveright published "The Double-Axe & Other Poems" on July 13, 1977, including Eleven Suppressed Poems, as well as a notable introduction by William Everson, Jeffers' most prominent posthumous poet and inheritor. As the environmental movement gained traction, Jeffers figured as a key voice for the natural world's worth and rights throughout the fifties and beyond. Ansel Adams, a photographer, was a close ally and long friend, as well as Edward Weston.

The belief that humankind is too self-centered and indifferent to the "astonishing beauty of things" is coined by Jeffers. Humans were "uncentered" in Jeffers' poem "Carmel Point." "Inhumanism" Jeffers' book "The Double Axe" was specifically discussed as "a shift of emphasis and significance from man to "notman," the rejection of human solipsism; and recognition of trans-human magnificence...It gives a solid basis for religious conviction, as well as the desire to celebrate greatness and admiration of beauty.

The first in-depth study of Jeffers not written by one of his circle, writer, and commentator J. Radcliffe Squires addresses the question of a peace of the world and potential beauty in mankind. "Jeffers has urged us to look at the universe directly." He has shared with us that materialism has its message, its relevance, and its solace. These are different from the message, relevance, and solace of humanism. Humanism teaches us why we suffer, but materialism teaches us how to suffer."

Source