ational Endowment for the Arts READER'S GUIDE FOUNDATION THE POETRY OF Robinson Jeffers 'Permanent things, or things forever renewed, like the grass and human passions, are the material for poetry ..." —ROBINSON JEFFERS from his essay "Poetry, Gongorism and a Thousand Years" (1948) Preface The poetry of Robinson Jeffers is emotionally direct, magnificently musical, and philosophically profound. No one has ever written more powerfully about the natural beauty of the American West Determined to write a truthful poetry purged of ephemeral things, Jeffers cultivated a style at once lyrical, tough-minded, and timeless. The National Endowment for the Arts joins the Poetry Foundation to create a new program to celebrate great American poets and the historic sites associated with their lives and works. By honoring these writers and literary landmarks, we hope both to bring poetry to a broader audience and to help preserve and promote local cultural heritage and history. The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to revitalize the role of literary reading in American popular culture. The Big Read aims to address this issue directly by providing citizens with the opportunity to read and discuss great books within their communities. Great literature combines enlightenment with enchantment. It awakens our imagination and enlarges our humanity. It can even offer harrowing insights that somehow console and comfort us. Whether you're a regular reader or a nonreader making up for lost time, thank you for joining The Big Read. ^aufciirW Dana Gioia Chairman National Endowment for the Arts C*&a ^W John Barr President Poetry Foundation Robinson Jeffers, 1948 Carmel Point The extraordinary patience of things! This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses — How beautiful when we first beheld it, Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs; No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing, Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rock-heads- Now the spoiler has come: does it care? Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide That swells and in time will ebb, and all Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty Lives in the very grain of the granite, Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. — As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from. -ROBINSON JEFFEF^ :.v^ ;v Introduction to Jeffers's Poetry BY DANA GIOIA The poetry of Robinson Jeffers is distractingly memorable, not only for its strong music, but also for the hard edge of its wisdom. His verse, especially the wild, expansive narratives that made him famous in the 1920s, does not fit into the conventional definitions of modern American poetry. Scarcely stirring from Carmel, California, Jeffers wrote about ideas: big, naked, howling ideas that no reader can miss. The directness and clarity of Jeffers's style reflects the priority he put on communicating his worldview. He challenged scientists on their own territory. Unlike most writers, he had studied science seriously in college and graduate school. He accepted the destruction of anthropocentric values explicit in current biology, geology, and physics. Jeffers concentrated on articulating the moral, philosophical, and imaginative implications of those discoveries. He struggled to answer the questions that science had been able only to ask: What are man's responsibilities in a world not made solely for him? How does humankind lead a good and meaningful life without a Providential God? Standing apart from the world, he passed dispassionate judgment on his race and civilization, and he found them wanting. Pointing out some grievous contradictions at the core of Western industrial society earned Jeffers a reputation as a bitter misanthrope (he sometimes was) but this verdict hardly invalidates the essential accuracy of his message. He saw the pollution of the environment, the destruction of other species, the squandering of natural resources, the recurrent urge to war, and the violent squalor of cities as the inevitable result of a species out of harmony with its own world. What saves Jeffers's poetry from unrelieved bitterness and nihilism is its joyful awe and indeed religious devotion to the natural world. Living on the edge of the Pacific, he found wisdom, strength, and perspective from observing the forces of nature around him. Magnificent, troubling, idiosyncratic, and uneven, Jeffers remains the great prophetic voice of American modernism. National Endowment for the Arts • THE BIG READ 3 Robinson Jeffers, 1887-1962 BY DANA GIOIA John Robinson Jeffers, the great poet of the American West Coast, was born in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father, William Hamilton Jeffers, was a professor of Old Testament Biblical Theology and a Presbyterian minister. A strict disciplinarian and serious intellectual, the elder Jeffers gave his son rigorous private lessons in Greek, Latin, and religion. By the time he was twelve, Jeffers was also fluent in French and German (learned during his schooling in Switzerland), but awkward among other children. Not surprisingly, the boy developed complex feelings toward his deeply loving but authoritarian father. Jeffers entered the University of Pittsburgh at fifteen. When his father retired the next year, the family moved to Los Angeles and Jeffers transferred to Occidental College, from which he graduated in 1905 at the age of eighteen. The precocious teenager did graduate work at several universities, studying literature, medicine, and forestry before realizing poetry was his calling. At the University of Southern California, Jeffers met Una Call Kuster, a beautiful woman who was not only two years older than he, but married to a wealthy local attorney. Robinson and Una fell irrevocably in love. After seven years of guilt-ridden romance with many renunciations, separations, reconciliations, and THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ROBINSON JEFFERS 1880s John Robinson Jeffers is born near Pittsburgh, 1887. Publicity from the Southern Pacific railroad company promises unique natural beauty and economic prosperity in California. 1 1890s Unprecedented drop in U.S. gold supply causes a three-year nationwide depression, 1893. Scottish immigrant John Muir publishes The Mountains of California as part of his ongoing effort to preserve the sublime Califomian landscape from the ravages of industry, 1894. Beginning of the Spanish- American War, 1898. Jeffers with his parents, 1 893 Jeffers as a young man 1900s Theodore Roosevelt takes office as U.S. President, 1901. Jack London's The Call of the Wild published, 1903. Jeffers graduates from Occidental College, 1905. An earthquake registering 8.3 on the Richter scale wreaks havoc across the San Francisco Bay area, 1906. Una Jeffers "She is more like a woman in a Scotch ballad, passionate, untamed and rather heroic — or like a falcon — than like any ordinary person." —ROBINSON JEFFERS v referring to his wife, Una, in his forward to The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (1938) eventually a public scandal, Una obtained a divorce on August 1, 1913. The next day she and Jeffers married. They traveled north to the wild Big Sur region of coastal California and rented a small cabin in the village of Carmel-by-the- Sea, which they recognized as their "inevitable place." The twenty-seven-year-old poet knew that he had not yet written anything of enduring value, despite the publication of his first book, Flagons and Apples (1912). The death of both Jeffers's father and his own newborn daughter in 1914 heightened his sense of mortality. After issuing a second collection, Californians (1916), Jeffers published nothing for eight years. He divided his time between writing and building a house for his family — which now included twin sons Donnan and Garth — on a promontory overlooking the Pacific Ocean. In 1 924 Jeffers published Tamar and Other Poems with a small press in New York. It attracted no initial notice, but a year later it was suddenly taken up by several influential critics. Jeffers Jeffers with his sons, Donnan and Garth, c. 1922 Jeffers's first book, Flagons and Apples, is published, 1912; Jeffers marries Una Call Kuster, 1913. World War I erupts in Europe, 1 91 4; America enters in 1 91 7. Armistice signed November 1 1 , 1918, ending World War I. The Treaty of Versailles is signed the following year by President Woodrow Wilson, 1919. Southern California experiences an oil boom and a population surge, leaving Los Angeles the most motorized city in the USA. Jeffers's acclaimed collection, Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, is published, 1925. Charles Lindbergh makes history by flying solo across the Atlantic Ocean, 1927. Jeffers publishes several collections of poetry. Due to the Great Depression, unemployment in California hits 28 percent, 1932. John Steinbeck's To a God Unknown is published, a novel influenced by Jeffers, 1933. Adolf Hitler's Germany invades Poland, beginning World War II in Europe, 1939. National Endowment for the Arts • THE BIG READ 5 produced an expanded trade edition containing what would be his most famous narrative poem, "Roan Stallion." Both public and critical opinion were extraordinary. Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems (1925) went into multiple reprintings. Critics compared him to Sophocles and Shakespeare, but Jeffers ignored his sudden celebrity and focused on his work. Over the next ten years he wrote the most remarkable, ambitious, and odd series of narrative poems in American literature, published in eight major collections. By World War II, Jeffers's critical reputation had collapsed and would not rise again until after his death. In 1945, however, the noted actress Judith Anderson asked the poet to translate and adapt Euripides's classical tragedy Medea for the modern stage. When Jeffers's Medea opened on Broadway in 1947, it stunned audiences and critics with its power and intensity. Medea 's success relieved Jeffers's financial worries, but the happiest days of his life were now behind him. After Una's slow death from cancer in 1950, he withdrew further from the world. Jeffers published only one book during the last fourteen years of his life, Hungerfield and Other Poems (1954). But even as his eyesight failed, he never stopped writing. A few days after his seventy- fifth birthday, he died in his sleep at Tor House. THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ROBINSON JEFFERS 1940s The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brings the U.S. into World Warll, 1941. The war ends after claiming upwards of fifty million lives worldwide, 1 945. Jeffers's translation of Euripides's Medea opens on Broadway to critical acclaim, 1947. George Orwell's 1984 published, 1949. 1950s Senator Joseph McCarthy brandishes a list of alleged communists in the State Department, heralding the dawn of the Cold War, 1950. Ansel Adams and other artists found Aperture magazine, dedicated to the art and technique of photography, 1952. Hungerfield and Other Poems published, 1954. 6 THE BIG READ • National Endowment for the Arts 1960s John F. Kennedy takes office as U.S. President; construction of the Berlin Wall begins, 1961. Jeffers dies at Tor House on January 20, 1962. The Beginning and the End and Other Poems is published posthumously as Jeffers's final work, 1963. Jeffers posed for this photograph in 1 958 when he won the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. "If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes: Perhaps of my planted forest a few May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils. Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant. . . ." —ROBINSON JEFFERS from his poem "Tor House" National Endowment for the Arts • THE BIG READ 7 After 1913, Robi hoped to live in England for a while. Before they could finalize their plans, however, World War I began in Europe and they were forced to remain in America. Seeking a coastal village where they could live a simple, quiet life, they decided to visit Carmel. California. letters had traveled widely in Europe and America, but Carmel and the Big Sur coast were different from an}' place he had ever been. "For the first time in my life," he later wrote of this first encounter. "I could see people living — amid magnificent unspoiled scenery — essentially as they did in the Idyls or the Sagas, or in Homer's Here was life purged of emeral accretions. Men were riding after cattle, or plowing the headland, hovered by white sea-gulls, as they have done for mousandsof years, and will for thousands of years to come. Here was contemporary life that was also permanent life. ..." During the next few years, Jeffers hiked the nearby mountains, explored the seacoast, and listened to the stories of people who lived there. He began to feel a profound connection to the landscape. In 1919, when he and Una built Tor House, his feeling of kinship with the land deepened By 1925, when he completed Hawk Tower, Jeffers and Carmel were one. 8 THE BIG READ • National Endowment for the Arts m "Jeffers Country" extends along the Monterey County coastline from Point Pinos in the north to Lucia and beyond in the south. This stretch of central California includes the Santa Lucia mountains, the Ventana wilderness, and Los Padres National Forest, as well as the rugged canyons and steep cliffs of the incomparable Big Sur. Native Americans inhabited the area for hundreds of years before Father Jumpero Serra built a mission there in 1771 and before a scattering of settlers arrived — a situation Jeffers alludes to in such poems as "Hands." By Jeffers's time, the city of Monterey was well established and the small village of Carmel was growing, but the area was mosdy wild. "It is not possible to be quite sane here," Jeffers said of the dramatic landscape. Like the local cypresses bent and twisted by the relentless ocean wind, some of the area's people led tortured lives — especially those who lived in remote canyons or in isolated cabins within sighnind sound of the sea. Like his contemporary John Steinbeck, RobinsoTl Jeffers set much of his work against a California backdrop. Through his haunting lyrics and dramatic narrative poems, Jeffers captures the energy and beauty of a landscape he called "the noblest thing I have ever seen." \ 'When the stage-coach topped the hill from Monterey, and we looked down through pines and sea-fogs on Carmel Bay, it was evident that we had come without knowing it to our inevitable place." ROBINSON JEFFERS fhen he and his wife first arrived in Carmel, California National Endowment for the Arts • THE BIG READ 9 Tor House and Hawk Tower Tor House derives its name from the rocky hill (called a "tor" in Gaelic) upon which the house is built. One of the rock outcroppings serves as a cornerstone and is celebrated in the poem "To the Rock That Will Be a Cornerstone of the House." Jeffers named Hawk The inscription "URJ" above the entrance to Hawk Tower Tower for the hawk that would visit him daily while he worked. Local contractor M.J. Murphy built the west wing of Tor House (1918-1919); Jeffers's son Donnan completed the east wing in 1957. In the intervening years, after spending mornings writing in the attic by the window looking outward to the mountains, Jeffers labored afternoons to make the other stone structures that comprise the buildings collectively known as Tor House: a stone wall and a detached garage (1919-1920), the latter converted to a kitchen in 1954; Hawk Tower (1920-1924); a dining room (1926-1930); and the first floor of the east wing (begun in 1937). Jeffers gathered the granite stones, which he called "the primitive rock" — more than 80-million-year- old Santa Lucia granite — from the shoreline below Tor House, "each stone / Baptized from that abysmal font" ("To the House"). He rolled the stones up from the sea, some of them weighing close to 400 pounds. Working alone, Jeffers built the forty-foot high Hawk Tower for Una. As his hands worked with stone, his mind worked on the poetry he would write the next morning. In addition to the exceptional stonemasonry — the beautiful Roman arch of the original garage, the flat arches of the north-facing windows of the dining room, the hidden passageway of Hawk Tower — the house and tower are notable for the artifacts that Jeffers embedded in the walls. These include pre-Colombian terra cotta heads from Mexico and small 10 THE BIG READ " National Endowment for the Arts This sundial sits in the garden of Tor House, near Hawk Tower. The inscription reads: "Life is but a Shadowe." tesserae from the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. He painted mottoes and verses on some walls, house beams, and furniture. The house did have running water, but lacked electricity or telephones. In and around the property, Jeffers planted some two thousand trees. Taken together, the poetry inspired by Tor House, the stonemasonry, the artifacts, the mottoes, and verses make the house and tower a living monument to one of America's greatest poets. "I built her a tower when I was young — Sometime she will die — I built it with my hands, I hung Stones in the sky . . ." —ROBINSON JEFFERS from his poem "For Una" lieve that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, influencing each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars; none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's affection outward toward this one God, rather than inward on one's self, or on humanity, or on human imagination and abstractions — the world of spirits. I think that it is our privilege and felicity to love God for his beauty, without claiming or expecting love from him. We are not important to him, but he to u —ROBINSON JEFFERS in a letter to Sister Mary Jane Power (1934) National EnJ lent for the Arts • THE BIG READ | | Jeffers's Poetry Lyric Poetry During Jeffers's life, the controversies about his narrative poems unfortunatelv overshadowed the shorter works tucked into the back pages of each new book. These lyric meditations — often autobiographical and generally written in long, rhythmic free- verse lines — marked a new kind of nature poem that tried to understand the physical world not from a human perspective but on its own terms. He rejected rhyme and traditional meter, which inhibited him from telling a story flexiblv in verse. Disclaiming the example of Walt \C nitman, Jeffers preferred — as scholar .Albert Gelpi explains — "to see the long verses of the Hebrew prophets and psalmists in the King James translation or the hexameters of Homer and Aeschylus as more kindred analogues and sources/' To say that Jeffers's chief imaginative gifts were scope, simplicity, narrative poise, and moral seriousness makes him seem closer to a distinguished jurist than a great poet. But there was something of the judge about Jeffers, particularly the Old Testament variety. In such poems as "Shine, Perishing Republic," Jeffers warns Robinson Jeffers, 1948 corrupt humanity against the evils of war and violence. His belief that mankind is not the center of the universe is expressed in poems like "Credo": "The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heart-breaking beauty / Will remain when there is no heart to break for it." When he is gone, he prays — in the poem "Granddaughter" — that his beloved little Una "will find / Powerful protection and a man like a hawk to cover her." Although Jeffers knew that he and his sons would die and that the world as they knew it would change, he predicted that "this rock will be | 2 THE BIG READ " National Endowment for the Arts here, grave, earnest, / not passive" in his poem "Oh Lovely Rock." As Jeffers believed, man might be "nature dreaming," but through hawks, stones, and the ocean, "The Beauty of Things" will endure: "to feel / Gready, and understand gready, and express gready, the natural / Beauty, is the sole business of poetry." Narrative Poetry While Jeffers devoted considerable attention to the lyric form throughout his career, his decision to write narrative poetry led him to the epic tradition and verse drama. From 1925 to 1954, Jeffers wrote the most stunning, ambitious, and stylistically diverse series of narrative poems in American literature. Originally published in fourteen major collections, these books add up to more than fifteen thousand pages of verse. Jeffers's epic-length poems such as Tamar, The Women at Point Sur, Cawdor, Thurso s Landing, and The Loving Shepherdess told the mostly tragic stories of men and women who lived on the Big Sur coast of California. His verse dramas such as The Tower Beyond Tragedy, Dear Judas, At the Beginning of an Age, Medea, and The Cretan Woman turned to ancient Greece, the Bible, and medieval Europe for inspiration. In both instances, Jeffers used traditional genres, subjects, and themes to interrogate the Western tradition as a whole and to illuminate modern life. His concern with the latter compelled him to look closely at American culture and the surrounding world. He was usually repelled by what he saw. Identifying "cruelty and filth and superstition" as the three banes of humankind, Jeffers lashed out at the horrific violence of the two World Wars, at the pollution destroying wildlife and ruining natural environments, and at the political and religious fanaticism darkening the minds of millions. Almost immediately Jeffers's long narrative poems divided audiences. Violent, sexual, philosophical, and subversive, these verse novels are alternately magnificent and hyperbolic, powerful and excessive, dramatic and overblown, and unlike anything else in modernist American poetry. National Endowment for the Arts • THE BIG READ | 3 Jeffers and American Culture In a culture where many believe that "poetry makes nothing happen," Jeffers remains strangely influential among both artists and scientists. Environmentalists and conservationists consider him an influential figure in the movement to protect natural habitat, wilderness, and coastal land. Guided by Ansel Adams, The Sierra Club's lavish folio Not Man Apart: Photographs of the Big Sur Coast combined lines from Jeffers's poetry with photographs in a work that helped focus political efforts to preserve that spectacular stretch of California coasdine. Poet Robert Hass calls Jeffers an "early environmentalist," as he was "perhaps the first American poet to grasp the devastating extent of the changes human technologies and populations were wreaking on the rest of the earth's biological life." Jeffers thoroughly understood and embraced the scientific worldview of his time. Indeed, the physicist Freeman Dyson, writing in The New York Review of Books in 1995, compares Jeffers to Einstein and says, "He expressed better than any other poet the scientist's vision." Top, playbill of Jeffers's Medea, c. 1948; middle, Jeffers on the cover of Time magazine, 1 948; bottom, the 1 973 Beach Boys album Holland features "The Beaks of Eagles," after the Jeffers poem. Astronomers and geologists remain interested in his work. Jeffers's poetry inspired two original and seminal Californian photographers: Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Throughout his life, Ansel Adams was particularly inspired by Jeffers: "I am going to do my best to call attention to the simplicities of environment and method; to 'the enormous beauty of | 4 THE BIG READ " National Endowment for the Arts Discussion Questions the world,' as Jeffers writes." Morley Baer, another important California photographer, read Jeffers's poems as a college student and many years later claimed, "Jeffers helped me see and sense the coast of California as a place of great tensions, great natural tensions that are part of life and not to be subdued and eradicated." Many musicians have been inspired by Jeffers's poetry — from jazz musician Walter Tolleson to UCLA geophysics professor Peter Bird. Composer Alva Henderson's first opera, Medea — after Jeffers's adaptation — was originally performed by the San Diego Opera. Even the California-born Beach Boys were inspired to write a song after Jeffers's poem "The Beaks of Eagles," which originally appeared on their 1973 album Holland. Jeffers's great triumph is that now — more than seventy-five years after his radical poetic voice first sounded — his poetry retains its power to inspire and disturb. Robinson Jeffers studied literature, philosophy, medicine, and forestry in graduate school. How do these four areas of study inform the subject matter and style of Jeffers's poetry? Jeffers and his wife, Una, discovered the coast of Carmel to be their "inevitable place." How does this landscape inform his poetry? Where is your "inevitable place"? What parallels can you imagine between the building of a stone house and the writing of a poem? Can you find examples of this parallel in Jeffers's poetry? Many mammals and birds — especially the red-tailed hawk and the falcon — appear in Jeffers's poetry. While his allusions to animals are certainly literal, what symbolic possibilities exist in poems such as "Rock and Hawk" or "Hurt Hawks"? In his poem "Carmel Point," Jeffers declares that "people are a tide / That swells and in time will ebb, and all / Their works dissolve." How poignant is the parallel Jeffers makes between the human race and the tide? National Endowment for the Arts • THE BIG READ | 5 Additional Resources The Poetry of Robinson Jeffers There are four paperback anthologies containing selected poetry of Robinson Jeffers, two published by Stanford University Press. The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers, edited by Albert Gelpi, also contains the long poem "Cawdor" (2003). Tim Hunt edited a longer anthology, The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, in 200 1 . The Collected Poetiy of Robinson Jeffers, also edited by Hunt, is a five-volume collection published between 1988 and 2002. All poetry cited in this Reader's Guide is available with the Poetry Foundation's poetry tool: wvuw.poetiyfoundation. org The Plays of Robinson Jeffers The Cretan Woman. First produced in 1954. The Tower Beyond Tragedy. First produced in November 1950. Medea. New York: Random House, 1946. Reprinted with "Cawdor." New York: New Directions, 1970. First produced in October 1947. in f In 1973, the United States Postal Service issued this stamp in honor of Robinson Jeffers. Selected Books about Jeffers and His Poetry Greenan, Edith. Of Una Jeffers: A Memoir. Ed. James Karman. Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 1998. Karman, James. Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California. Rev. ed. Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 2001. Karman, James, ed. Stones of the Sur: Poetry by Robinson Jeffers, Photographs by Morley Baer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Zaller, Robert, ed. Centennial Essays for Robinson Jeffers. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1991. | 6 THE BIG READ • National Endowment for the Arts The National Endowment for the Arts is a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts — both new and established — bringing the arts to all Americans, and providing leadership in arts education. Established national by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government, the endowment Endowment is the nation's largest annual hinder of the arts, bringing great art to all 50 states, including rural areas, inner cities, and military bases. FORTHE ARTS A great nation deserves great art POETRY The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It has embarked on an ambitious plan to bring the best poetry before the largest possible audiences. Works Cited Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry arid American Culture. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1991. Gioia, Dana, Chryss Yost, and Jack Hicks, eds. California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present. Berkeley, CA Heyday Books, 2004. Gioia, Dana, David Mason, Meg Schoerke, eds. Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry. New York McGraw Hill, 2004. Jeffers, Robinson. The Collected Poetry of Robinson J effers, edited by Tim Hunt, Vols. 1-5. Stanford, CA Stanford University Press, 1988-2001. . The Collected Letters of Robinson f effers with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers, edited by James Karman (forthcoming, Stanford University Press). . The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson] effers. Ed. Albert Gelpi. Stanford, CA Stanford University Press, 2003. Robinson Jeffers, "Carmel Point" and excerpts from "Tor House," "For Una," "De Rerum Virtute" and "The Beauty of Things," from The Selected Poetry of Robinson f effers. Copyright 1935 and © 1963 by Donnan Jeffers and Garth Jeffers. Used by permission of Random House, Inc. Acknowledgments David Kipen, NEA Director of Literature, National Reading Initiatives Writers: Dana Gioia and Erika Koss for the National Endowment for the Arts. "Tor House and Hawk Tower" by Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts; "Jeffers and California" by James Karman. Series Editor: Erika Koss for the National Endowment for the Arts Image Editor: Dan Brady for the National Endowment for the Arts Graphic Design: Fletcher Design/Washington, DC Special thanks to Alex Vardamis and Joan Hendrickson of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation. Image Credits Cover Portrait; John Sherffius for The Big Read. Inside Front Coven Photo by Nat Farbman/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images. Page 1: Dana Gioia, image by Vance Jacobs; photo of John Barr courtesy of the Poetry Foundation. Page 2: © Greg Probst/ Corbis. Pages 4—6: Photos of Jeffers with his mother and father, with his sons, and as an older man are courtesy of the Tor House Foundation; photo of Jeffers as a young man and photo of Una Jeffers by Nat Farbman/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images. Page 7: Photo by Horace Lyon, courtesy of the Tor House Foundation. Pages 8—11: Photos by Erika Koss, used with permission. Page 12: Photo by Nat Farbman/Time Life Pictures/ Getty Images. Page 14: Playbill courtesy of the Tor House Foundation; magazine cover courtesy of Time Life Pictures/Getty Images; Holland album cover, from the LP collection of Gareth Davies-Morris, used with permission. Page 16: "Robinson Jeffers Stamp" image reprinted with permission of the United States Postal Service. All Rights Reserved. This publication is published by: National Endowment for the Arts • 1 100 Pennsvlvania Avenue, N.W. • Washington, DC 20506-0001 (202) 682-5400 • www.nea.gov www.NEABigRead.org July 2008 "One light is left us: the beauty of things, not men; The immense beauty of the world, not the human world. Look — and without imagination, desire nor dream — directly At the mountains and sea. Are they not beautiful?" —ROBINSON JEFFERS from his poem "De Rerum Virtute" N AT I O N A L ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. Jeffers educational materials are made possible through the generous support of the Poetry Foundation. ■M* FOUNDATION A great nation deserves great art. www.NEABigRead.org