Selected Poetry Book

When he was alive I paid very little attention to Robinson Jeffers. My attention to poetry was taken up with American poets who wove a tighter fabric of meaning or at least of implication: Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound. But picking Jeffers up in 2011 I enjoyed and respected his verse. Early in this selection it is metrical and resonant. It has gut satisfaction. It is straightforward. He is resonant in denunciation. That's no small virtue. I think of 18th-century poets like Pope and Charles Churchill. As the years pass it wanders towards prose. In these years he suffered and expressed disgust at human behavior in the Second World War, and the loss of his wife and become more and more bitter. He tends to eulogize nature, not a pretty, but a strong, statuesque nature, not friendly but authoritative, particularly as geology and as raptors. He praises the violence in nature; it excites his imagination, but tends to deplore violence in people. As the years go on he tends to repeat himself, and some of his later poems seem like self-parodies. It is said that Robert Frost quipped of Jeffers, "It is wise to praise the hawk, but not too often."