In 1938 Random House published "The Selected Poetry of Robinson
Jeffers," a volume that would remain in print for more than fifty
years. For decades it drew enough poets, students, and general
readers to keep Jeffers--in spite of the almost total academic
neglect that followed his fame in the 1920s and 1930s--a force in
American poetry.
Now scholars are at last beginning to recognize that he created a
significant alternative to the High Modernism of Pound, Eliot, and
Stevens. Similarly, contemporary poets who have returned to the
narrative poem acknowledge Jeffers to be a major poet, while those
exploring California and the American West as literary regions have
found in him a foundational figure. Moreover, Jeffers stands as a
crucial precursor to contemporary attempts to rethink our
practical, ethical, and spiritual obligations to the natural world
and the environment.
These developments underscore the need for a new selected edition
that would, like the 1938 volume, include the long narratives that
were to Jeffers his major work, along with the more easily
anthologized shorter poems. This new selected edition differs from
its predecessor in several ways. When Jeffers shaped the 1938
"Selected Poetry," he drew from his most productive period
(1917-37), but his career was not over yet. In the quarter century
that followed, four more volumes of his poetry were published. This
new selected edition draws from these later volumes, and it
includes a sampling of the poems Jeffers left unpublished, along
with several prose pieces in which he reflects on his poetry and
poetics.
This edition also adopts the texts of the recently completed "The
Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers" (five volumes, Stanford,
1988-2000). When the poems were originally published, copy editors
and typesetters adjusted Jeffers's punctuation, often obscuring the
rhythm and pacing of what he actually wrote, and at points even
obscuring meaning and nuance. This new selected edition, then, is a
much broader, more accurate representation of Jeffers's career than
the previous "Selected Poetry."
Reviews of volumes in
"The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers"
"A masterful job of contemporary scholarly editing, this book
begins an edition intended to clarify a 'Jeffers canon, '
establishing for times to come the verse legacy of a poet who
looked on all things with the eyes of eternity."--"San Francisco
Chronicle"
"This edition will be standard . . . a tribute and justice to a
poet whose independent strength has survived to challenge personal
and public canons."--"Virginia Quarterly Review"
"Jeffers is the last of the major poets of his generation--Frost,
Stevens, Williams, Pound, Moore, Eliot--to get his collected poems.
Now that the job is at hand, it is done very well. . . . Tim Hunt
has been painstaking in his editorial preparation and judicious in
his presentation. . . . A great poet is ready for his
due."--"Philadelphia Inquirer"
"Few American poets are treated as well by publishers as Jeffers is
by Stanford University Press. . . . These poems represent a
distinctive voice in the American canon, and it is good to have
them so wonderfully set forth."--"Christian Century"
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