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A 1933 Edward Weston Photo of Jeffers from
the Oxy Jeffers Collection
Occidental College
has a fine collection of Jeffers letters,
manuscripts, books and
pictures.
This website is a
virtual gallery of Jeffers work and other rare
items from the collection.
Jeffers at
Occidental College
The Poetry
Jeffers'
Fascinating Friends and Family
The
Controversial Life of the Poet
Organizations
Dedicated to the Man and his Poetry
Other Online Exhibits
Special
thanks to Mr. Lindsay Jeffers and Jeffers Literary
Properties for permission to display Jeffers'
poetry and/or excerpts. For inquiries
concerning publication rights contact Ariane
de Pree, Contract & Rights Manager, Stanford
University Press, 1450 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto,
CA 94304-1124.
Website designed by
Aleks Sedzielarz (Oxy Class of '06)
Summer 2004 Library Intern
Mellon Librarian Recruitment Program.
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Oxy's Poet Alumnus
The Jeffers Collection at the Mary Norton Clapp Library
Imagine yourself driving down the California
coast south of Santa Cruz in the 1930's. The air has
the unrefined smell of flourishing sea-life, salt and
earth. The strikingly clear blue and green ocean files
slowly towards land until it roars against the rocky
shore with mist and foam. Not far from the craggy
piled rocks and steep cliffs where the verdant coastal
mountains intersect with the sea, among a few hardy,
jagged Monterey Cypresses, you come upon a tower
skillfully built of enormous, water-smoothed rocks. It
strikes you as something from the deep past, like the
forgotten solitary ruin of a Celtic fortress. Next to
it is a house beautifully crafted in the same style. A
man and woman emerge from the house. She is
disarmingly beautiful and has strong matriarchal
features and posture. The man is lean and rough as the
nearby Cypresses. He has lines of sorrow and
contemplation around his mouth and eyes, yet a subtle
softness surfaces beneath his rough face. This is the
poet and his wife. Thoreau went to the woods to learn
to live and came back with his story for the world,
Jeffers went to the sea to settle down and lived out
his days as a man fully engaged in life and nature.
From this vantage point Jeffers sent poetry out to
teach humankind the way life actually felt outside of
the comfort and presumption of civilization.
Robinson
Jeffers graduated from Occidental College as part of
the class of 1905. He is a decidedly Californian poet
and one of the major American poets of the first half
of the 20th century.
He was the
author of more than 15 books of poetry and criticism,
he wrote critically acclaimed theater productions, has
been anthologized numerous times. Jeffers poetry is
even quite popular internationally and has been
translated into many languages including
Japanese and
Czech.
Jeffers was
a controversial figure during his lifetime- an
individualist and ardent lover of nature. He was
artistically conservative, yet espoused a strong
independent pacifist and anti-imperialist political
philosophy amid the rampant nationalism and
unquestioning patriotism of the periods of the first
and second world war.
He was one
of only three poets--with Amy Lowell and T.S.
Eliot--to appear on
the
cover of
Time magazine (in an April 1932 issue). He has
been honored at the
Library of Congress and his life's work has been
commemorated on a U.S. stamp.
Robinson
Jeffers appeals to a wide range of readers from lovers
of classical literature, from which he drew many of
his themes and techniques, to hikers and
outdoors-people who, whether they have a knowledge of
poetry or are relatively unacquainted with verse,
respond to the simple, yet profound natural rhythms
and images of his poems. This inherent appeal has
supplied a continuous fan base for his work and
sustained the field of Jeffers studies amid harsh
treatment by academic critics. In an October 2003
article, L.A. Times writer Lawrence Christon described
the rough beauty of Jeffers' environmentalist
philosophy by saying that Jeffers was a poet that
proved that "bird-watching ain't wimpy."
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"The tides are in our veins, we
still mirror the stars,
life is your child, but there is in
me
Older and harder than life and more
impartial, the eye
that watched before there was an
ocean. "
-Jeffers, Continent's
End
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