Robinson Jeffers

Robinson Jeffers is perhaps the most underrepresented, misunderstood, and underrated of the twentieth century’s American Modernist poets. It seems especially just to discuss him on the basis of four relatively untouched aspects: as a religious poet of the first order; as a cogent anti-Modernist Modernist – a verse innovator, dramatist, and literary theorist – as an interpreter of the West and of the Western myth; and as a patriot.

Jeffers stands out as one of the last century’s great religious poets. If one listens carefully there is not one poem that is not religious in some way. His beginnings were in the orthodox tradition, his father being an ordained Presbyterian minister and seminary professor, his mot