(Volume of letters. Edited by Ann N. Ridgeway. Foreword by...)
Volume of letters. Edited by Ann N. Ridgeway. Foreword by Mark Van Doren. Photographs by Leigh Weiner.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801805562/?tag=2022091-20
Jeffers was born in January 10, 1887 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh), United States, the son of a Presbyterian minister and scholar of ancient languages and Biblical history, Reverend Dr. William Hamilton Jeffers, and Annie Robinson Tuttle. His brother was Hamilton Jeffers, a well-known astronomer who worked at Lick Observatory.
Jeffers was reading Greek by the age of 5, and he attended boarding schools in Switzerland and Germany.
He received a bachelor of arts degree in 1905 from Occidental College.
He undertook graduate study in the sciences at several universities, studying medicine at the University of California.
His early love of the classics and his strong scientific interests and knowledge are both reflected in his poetry.
Another profound influence was the California coast near Carmel where he secluded himself throughout much of his life.
His typical poems represent humanity as "the atom to be split" by tragedy until it releases a fire as clean as cliffs and hawks--the nature outside humanity.
In 1912 an inheritance freed him to concentrate exclusively on writing poetry. After his marriage in 1914, Jeffers settled in Carmel, Calif. , where he built a stone tower on a lonely cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. In the 1920s and 1930s, at the height of his popularity, Jeffers was famous for being a tough outdoorsman, living in relative solitude and writing of the difficulty and beauty of the wild. He spent most of his life in Carmel, California, in a granite house that he had built himself called "Tor House and Hawk Tower". During this time, Jeffers published volumes of long narrative blank verse that shook up the national literary scene. He wrote a poem entitled "Credo" which many feel refers to Krishnamurti. In Cawdor and Other Poems (1928), Dear Judas and Other Poems (1929), Descent to the Dead, Poems Written in Ireland and Great Britain (1931), Thurso's Landing (1932), and Give Your Heart to the Hawks (1933), Jeffers continued to explore the questions of how human beings could find their proper relationship (free of human egocentrism) with the divinity of the beauty of things. Many books followed Jeffers' initial success with the epic form, including an adaptation of Euripides' Medea, which became a hit Broadway play starring Dame Judith Anderson. Part of the decline of Jeffers' popularity was due to his staunch opposition to the United States' entering World War II. In fact, his book The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948), a volume of poems that was largely critical of U. S. policy, came with an extremely unconventional note from Random House that the views expressed by Jeffers were not those of the publishing company. Soon after, his work was received negatively by several influential literary critics. Jeffers would publish poetry intermittently during the 1950s but his poetry never again attained the same degree of popularity that it had in the 1920s and the 1930s.
(The author's first book, a book of early love lyrics, in ...)
(Volume of letters. Edited by Ann N. Ridgeway. Foreword by...)
Young Jeffers rejected his father's belief in God but retained the Calvinistic sense of man as depraved and damned.
Jeffers coined the word inhumanism, the belief that mankind is too self-centered and too indifferent to the "astonishing beauty of things. " In the famous poem "Carmel Point, " Jeffers called on humans to "uncenter" themselves.
He met Una Call Kuster in 1906; she was three years older than he was, a graduate student, and the wife of a Los Angeles attorney. Jeffers and Mrs. Kuster became lovers. Mr. Kuster discovered their affair in 1910. By 1912 the affair became a scandal, reaching the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Una spent some time in Europe to quiet things down, then the lovers lived together by Lake Washington to await the completion of Una's divorce. The two were married in 1913, then moved to La Jolla, California, and finally Carmel, California, where Jeffers constructed Tor House and Hawk Tower. The couple had a daughter who died a day after birth in 1913, and then twin sons (Donnan and Garth) in 1916. Una died of cancer in 1950.
