Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) is not only the greatest poet that
California (and indeed the American West) has produced but a major poet
of the twentieth century who occupies a prominent place in the tradition
of American prophetic poetry.
Jeffers consciously set himself apart from the poetry of his
generation--by physical isolation at his home in Carmel, by his unusual
poetic form, and by his stance as an "anti-modernist." Yet his work
represents a profound, and profoundly original, artistic response to
problems that shaped modernist poetry and that still perplex poets
today.
For Jeffers, as for no other important modern American poet, there has
never been a collected poems, not even a truly representative selected
poems--the current Selected Poetry, first published in 1938, contains
no poems from the last three volumes published during Jeffers's lifetime
or from his posthumous volume. Now, for the first time, all of Jeffers's
completed poems, both published and unpublished, are presented in a
single, comprehensive, and textually authoritative edition of five
volumes.
The present volume is in three parts. "Poetry 1903-1920" consists of
some of the poems published while Jeffers was a college student, two
early collections (Flagons and Apples and Californians), and a
number of poems that were never published or were recently rediscovered.
"Introductions, Forewords, and Miscellaneous Prose, 1920-1948" gathers
all the major prose works. "Unpublished Poems and Fragments, 1910-1962"
is mostly material that Jeffers never published, and apparently never
tried to publish. The fifth volume of commentary will contain various
procedural explanations and textual evidence for the texts presented in
the edition, as well as transcriptions of working notes for the poems
and of alternate and discarded passages. The Collected Poetry is
designed by Adrian Wilson.
