meaning of tor house poem by robinson jeffers

Indeed, he is one of the greatest visionary poets of the natural sublime ever to have written and was a crucial influence on the environmental movement. Dana Gioia, the poet, critic and former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, has observed that Jeffers continues to grow in stature as the greatest poet to date of the American west, one of the greatest American poets of the natural world, and one of the most powerful narrative poets America has produced. Jeffers retains his power to inspire and to provoke. More than forty years after the poet’s death, the reading public and the scholarly community are only now beginning to have the opportunity to see Jeffers’s entire oeuvre. James Karman, after producing the first full biography, is now editing the complete letters, of which the first volume appeared in 2009. In 2001, Stanford University Press brought out the fifth and final volume of The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, the first fully annotated collection, edited by Tim Hunt, a drawing together of all the work (including the prose).

Collections of his poetry continue to sell well. His books sold scores of thousands of copies and several have remained in print almost continuously. Jeffers was tremendously popular with the public and with influential critics in the 1920s and early 1930s. In a spiritual age which could best be characterized by the sublime disorder of “The Waste Land,” he built an antinomian faith on the rock of what he called “Inhumanism,” a mix of pantheism, science, and mystical worship of the fierce beauty of nature.

Claiming that history and society drove him to despair, he nonetheless addressed politics as forthrightly as any poet of his time, although his isolationist stand drew scornful fire from many quarters beginning in the 1930s. Eliot and Ezra Pound, insisted on the necessary difficulty of poetic language, Jeffers denounced their work as trivial mannerism and strove for clarity of rhetoric, feeling, and thought. In a time when many contemporary poets, following T. His dates, 1887 to 1962, are virtually identical with those of many of the greatest artists of international modernism, yet during a time when the post-symbolist lyric came to dominate poetry, he built much of his reputation on tragic verse dramas and wild, luridly violent book-length narratives that exude epic ambition. Robinson Jeffers led one of the most fascinating and controversial careers of any American poet.

Meaning of tor house poem by robinson jeffers