John Robinson Jeffers, a master of cadenced verse in short lyric and long narrative, stands out from his contemporaries for earnest craftsmanship and tragic, doomed battles between nature and technology. Amid the constant cycles of earth, sea, and sky, his harsh voice strove in vain for a lyrical contentment in nature. In a poetic struggle unmatched by his contemporaries, Jeffers’ solitary strife sets him apart from literary movements in a poetic world order of his own making.
Jeffers was born January 10, 1887, in Allegheny near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Sewickley and Edgeworth, Pennsylvania, and various parts of Europe. He was tutored and educated at private schools in Zurich, Lucerne, Vevey, Lausanne, and Geneva. In 1902, his family settled in California, where his lyric consciousness took shape. When he was 17 years old, he published “The Condor” in Youth’s Companion.
Jeffers attended the University of Pittsburgh and Occidental College, where he edited a school journal, The Occidental. His only satisfying achievements in college were swim meets and running the mile. Unfocused graduate work at the universities of Southern California, Zurich, and Washington proved that his future lay in verse, not medicine or forestry.
After publishing a tentative volume, Flagons and Apples (1912), Jeffers came into a legacy that allowed him leisure to produce a steady flow of rough-hewn, idiosyncratic poems. In 1916, Jeffers published Californians, then achieved critical and popular fame with Tamar and Other Poems (1924). Subsequent collections—Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems (1925), set in Monterey, California, and The Women at Point Sur (1927), a well-received narrative poem—cinched his reputation for tragic lyricism and austere themes and backgrounds. His mature work—Cawdor and Other Poems (1928) and Dear Judas and Other Poems (1929)—reached toward a hopeful humanism. In the 1930s, Jeffers developed primitive passion in Descent to the Dead (1931), Thurso’s Landing and Other Poems (1932), Give Your Heart to the Hawks (1933), Solstice and Other Poems (1935), The Beaks of Eagles (1936), and Such Counsels You Gave to Me (1937), all imbued with moodiness and naturalistic creativity. In Two Consolidations (1940), Be Angry at the Sun (1941), Medea (1946), The Double Axe (1948), and Hungerfield and Other Poems (1953), he revealed a complex world view comprised of bleak introversion and inept reaches for the sublime through myth.
In 1941, John Gassner adapted Jeffers’ Tower Beyond Tragedy for the stage at an outdoor theater in Carmel, where Dame Judith Anderson played the lead. In 1947, two more works—Dear Judas and Medea—were staged. Jeffers died in his sleep at home on January 20, 1962.
