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"For too many decades Jeffers has been the forgotten giant of
American poetry. The Wild God of the World gathers his best and
most central work. For those who would discover Jeffers, the
intense beauty of his poems of the California coast; the reach of
his meditations on history, science, and God; and the lyricism of
his personal poems, this is the place to start--and a place to
return again and again." --Tim Hunt, Washington State
University
"Of all the poets of his generation, [Robinson Jeffers] made our
relation to this earth and sea and sky and wheeling seasons and the
evolutionary processes that made trees and salmon runs and hunting
hawks, his subject. As that relation grows more troubled, his words
become more necessary. To have this beautifully edited and freshly
seen anthology is a gift."
--Robert Hass, University of California, Berkeley
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includes a sampling of the poems Jeffers left unpublished, along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"
Once the subject of a literary cult, American poet Robinson Jeffers
(1887-1962) was later rejected by liberal taste and by the academic
establishment. But in the last decade he has found a new audience.
His indictments of the modern world are increasingly pertinent; the
passion behind his writing, his subtle and strong rhythms and his
clearsightedness set him in a class of his own. Colin Falck
suggests that the neglect of Jeffers 'may be a measure of the
spiritual void at the heart of our culture, and a confirmation of
some of his direst insights.' Jeffers's work has an energy and a
spiritual intensity which are increasingly rare in poetry. Colin
Falck draws mainly from Jeffers's shorter poems for this centenary
edition, but also includes an extract from the celebrated
translation of Euripides's 'Medea'.
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) is not only the greatest poet that the
American West has produced but also a major poet of the twentieth
century in the tradition of American prophetic poetry. This
anthology serves as an introduction to Jeffers's work for the
general reader and for students in courses on American poetry.
Jeffers composed each volume of his verse around one or two long
narrative or dramatic poems. "The Wild God of the World" follows
this practice: in it, "Cawdor," one of Jeffers's most powerful
narratives, is surrounded by a representative selection of shorter
poems.
At the end of the book, the editor has provided revealing
statements about Jeffers's poetry and poetics, and about his
philosophy of nature and human nature.
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Medea (Paperback)
Robinson Jeffers
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R419
Discovery Miles 4 190
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) is not only the greatest poet that
California (and indeed the American West) has produced but a major
poet of the twentieth century who occupies a prominent place in the
tradition of American prophetic poetry. Jeffers consciously set
himself apart from the poetry of his generation—by physical
isolation at his home in Carmel, by his unusual poetic form, and by
his stance as an “anti-modernist.” Yet his work represents a
profound, and profoundly original, artistic response to problems
that shaped modernist poetry and that still perplex poets today.
Now, for the first time, all of Jeffers’s completed poems, both
published and unpublished, are presented in a single,
comprehensive, and textually authoritative edition of five volumes.
The present volume is in four parts. An Introduction deals with the
scope and principles of selection for the edition, including the
decision to present the poems in chronological order, and gives a
brief review of the textual evidence and commentary that form the
bulk of this volume. The essay “Chronology” offers an overview
of Jeffers’s career, the evidence for dating the poems, and the
arguments drawn from that evidence. The two parts that follow
describe the rationale and evidence for establishing the texts of
the poems for this edition, and present, in the form of extensive
commentary and tabulations for each poem, the material (notes,
preliminary workings, revisions, discarded passages, and variations
in published versions) that both complicate and enrich the study of
Jeffers’s poetry and prose. These commentaries also incorporate a
number of additional selections from Jeffers’s previously
unpublished writings. There are three appendixes: tables of
contents for original editions as well as some planned editions
that were never published; poems (not included in this edition)
that have appeared in posthumous compilations; and errata for the
first four volumes. The book concludes with two indexes, of titles
and of first lines.
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) is not only the greatest poet that
California (and indeed the American West) has produced but a major
poet of the twentieth century who occupies a prominent place in the
tradition of American prophetic poetry.
Jeffers consciously set himself apart from the poetry of his
generation--by physical isolation at his home in Carmel, by his
unusual poetic form, and by his stance as an "anti-modernist." Yet
his work represents a profound, and profoundly original, artistic
response to problems that shaped modernist poetry and that still
perplex poets today.
For Jeffers, as for no other important modern American poet, there
has never been a collected poems, not even a truly representative
selected poems--the current "Selected Poetry, " first published in
1938, contains no poems from the last three volumes published
during Jeffers's lifetime or from his posthumous volume. Now, for
the first time, all of Jeffers's completed poems, both published
and unpublished, are presented in a single, comprehensive, and
textually authoritative edition of five volumes.
The present volume is in three parts. "Poetry 1903-1920" consists
of some of the poems published while Jeffers was a college student,
two early collections ("Flagons and Apples" and "Californians"),
and a number of poems that were never published or were recently
rediscovered. "Introductions, Forewords, and Miscellaneous Prose,
1920-1948" gathers all the major prose works. "Unpublished Poems
and Fragments, 1910-1962" is mostly material that Jeffers never
published, and apparently never tried to publish. The fifth volume
of commentary will contain various procedural explanations and
textual evidence for the texts presented in the edition, as well as
transcriptions of working notes for the poems and of alternate and
discarded passages. The "Collected Poetry" is designed by Adrian
Wilson.
The precipitous cliffs, rolling headlands, and rocky inlets of the
Big Sur coast of California were alive for Robinson Jeffers, and
throughout his long career as a poet, he extolled their wild
beauty. His vivid descriptions inspired the best work of other
artists who lived nearby, including such noted photographers as
Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and their younger contemporary Morley
Baer.
Before he died in 1995, Baer was planning a volume that would bring
together a group of his landscape photographs of the Big Sur area
with a selection of poems that expressed Jeffers's mystical
experience of stone. Jeffers believed that stone is alive, perhaps
even conscious in some way. Baer wanted to create a visual and
literary meditation on the life-experience of stone. James Karman
was invited by Baer to serve as his collaborator, and has brought
the project to completion--more than 50 of Baer's photographs
paired with poems by Jeffers (some complete, others excerpted).
"Stones of the Sur" is in five parts, each of which takes its title
from a poem. Part I, "Tor House," contains photographs and poems
about Jeffers's home, ever the locus of his inspiration. Part II,
"Continent's End," begins with a panoramic view of the coastline
and is followed by visual and textual images that become
progressively narrower in scope as Baer and Jeffers focus on the
mountains, cliffs, beaches, boulders, rocks, and pebbles of the Big
Sur.
The inward progression continues in Part III, "Oh Lovely Rock,"
where Baer trains his lens on close surfaces--revealing his
sensibilities at their most abstract. From the middle of Part III
on, the spiral is reversed and the view begins to open. Part IV,
"Credo," expands outwardly from the pebbles and rocks of the Big
Sur back to the beaches, cliffs, and mountains. Part V, "The Old
Stone-Mason," concludes the book with a return to Tor House.
The years 1921 to 1927 were the most productive of Robinson
Jeffers's career. During this period, he wrote not only many of his
most well-known lyric poems but also Tamar, The Tower Beyond
Tragedy, Roan Stallion, and The Women at Point Sur-the long poems
that first established his reputation as a major American poet.
Including an introduction, chronology, and critical afterword, the
Point Alma Venus manuscripts presented here gather Jeffers's four
unfinished but substantial preliminary attempts at what became The
Women at Point Sur, which Jeffers believed was the "most inclusive,
and poetically the most intense" of his narrative poems. The Point
Alma Venus fragments and versions shed important light on the
composition and themes of The Women at Point Sur. Further, they
likely predate other key work from this crucial period, making them
a necessary context for those who wish to clarify Jeffers's poetic
development and to reinterpret his practice of narrative poetry.
Ultimately, they call on general and scholarly readers alike to
reconsider Jeffers's place in the canon of modern American poetry.
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) is not only the greatest poet that
California (and indeed the American West) has produced but a major
poet of the twentieth century who occupies a prominent place in the
tradition of American prophetic poetry. Jeffers consciously set
himself apart from the poetry of his generation-by physical
isolation at his home in Carmel, by his unusual poetic form, and by
his stance as an "anti-modernist." Yet his work represents a
profound, and profoundly original, artistic response to problems
that shaped modernist poetry and that still perplex poets today;
how to reconcile scientific and artistic discourses and modes of
vision; how to connect present-day experience to myths perceived as
lying at the origins of human culture; how to renew the poetic
language and how (or whether) to present art's claim to moral,
spiritual, or epistemological seriousness within representations of
modern phenomena. For Jeffers, as for no other important modern
American poet, there has never been a collected poems, not even a
truly representative selected poems-the current Selected Poetry,
first published in 1938, contains no work from the last three
volumes published during Jeffers' lifetime or from his posthumous
volume. Now, for the first time, all of Jeffers' completed poems,
both published and unpublished, are presented in a single,
comprehensive, and textually authoritative edition. The first three
volumes of this four-volume work, will present chronologically all
of Jeffers' published work from 1920 to 1963. The present volume
consists of poems written from 1939 to Jeffers' death in 1963,
including the dramatic poems The Bowl of Blood, Medea, and The
Double Axe byt were eventually omitted for reasons that are
unclear; and those poems from his last years, which appeared
posthumously in The Beginning and the End, that seem to be
completed drafts.
Robinson Jeffers died in 1962 at the age of seventy-five, ending one of the most controversial poetic careers of this century.
The son of a theology professor at Western Seminary in Pittsburgh, Jeffers was taught Greek, Latin, and Hebrew as a boy, and spent three years in Germany and Switzerland before entering the University of Western Pennsylvania (now Pittsburgh) at fifteen. His education continued on the West Coast after his parents moved there, and he received a B.A. from Occidental College at eighteen. His interest in forestry, medicine, and general science led him to pursue his studies at the University of Southern California, and the University of Zurich.
The poems in this volume have been selected from his major works, among them Be Angry at the Sun; Hungerfield; The Double Axe; Roan Stallion; Tamar and Other Poems; as well as The Beginning and the End, which contains his last poems.
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the
1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly
expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable,
high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger
Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain
imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed
pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we
have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting,
preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger
Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and
hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone
This book is a facsimile reprint and may contain imperfections such
as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages.
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