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; how to reconcile scientific and artistic discourses and modes of
vision; how to connect present-day experience to myths perceived as
lying at the origins of human culture; how to renew the poetic language
and how (or whether) to present art's claim to moral, spiritual, or
epistemological seriousness within representations of modern phenomena.
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 work from the last three volumes published during Jeffers' lifetime
or from his posthumous volume. Now, for the first time, all of Jeffers'
completed poems, both published and unpublished, are presented in a
single, comprehensive, and textually authoritative edition.
The first three volumes of this four-volume work, will present
chronologically all of Jeffers' published work from 1920 to 1963. The
present volume consists of poems written from 1939 to Jeffers' death in
1963, including the dramatic poems The Bowl of Blood, Medea, and
The Double Axe byt were eventually omitted for reasons that are
unclear; and those poems from his last years, which appeared
posthumously in The Beginning and the End, that seem to be completed
drafts.
