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The first collection in twenty years of essays on Robinson Jeffers, one of the great American poets of the twentieth century, this work signals the sea change in Jeffers scholarship, as well as the increasing breadth and depth of criticism of the literature of the American West. The essays assembled here highlight issues and theories critical to Jeffers studies, among them the advance of ecocriticism, the reimagining of regionalism as place studies, the continuing development of cultural studies and the new historicism, the increasingly poignant vector of science and literature, the new formalism, particularly as it pertains to narrative verse, and the glaring omission of feminist analysis in Jeffers scholarship. Jeffers has always appealed to a wider audience than many twentieth-century poets, and this book will speak to that general readership as well as to scholars and students.
This work is the first volume of critical essays devoted to the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Although Jeffers was likened to some of the greatest figures in the literary world, his work was controversial. His preoccupation with violence and sexuality was denounced by some, his alleged blasphemy by others. Condemned by moralists, Marxists, and Cold Warriors alike, Jeffers fell into obscurity until his death in 1962. Included are nine original essays by leading Jeffers scholars.
A selection of book reviews, articles, and essays that run the gamut from glorification to deprecation, all the more remarkable in that the selections were chosen for their representativeness and, in the case of reviews, to reveal the response Jeffers (1887-1962) received as his books appeared. Karm
Robinson Jeffers’ name has been so inseparably linked with California that it is difficult to think of his origins being elsewhere. Jeffers was both in 1887 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father was a professor at Western Theological Seminary and a scholar of ancient languages who taught his son to read Greek before he started school. In 1902, Jeffers enrolled in the University of Western Pennsylvania, now the University of Pittsburgh, but his family moved to California soon thereafter, and he graduated from Occidental College at the age of eighteen. Inhumanism was the label Jeffers first used in the preface to The Double Axe and Other Poems to explain the doctrine that permeates all of his poetry. Defining humanism as “a system of thinking in which man, his interests, and development, are made dominant, his addition of the negative prefix was his attempt to subdue human interests and development to something greater, contrasting them against the magnificent beauty and immense worth of the natural world. In addition to discussing Jeffers’ life and philosophy, Monjian analyzes the form and style of his poetry, calling it “a singular style, slashing its way across the page with violence of image and a free, crashing rhythm.” She ends the book: “Whatever the future holds for this poet, our own age is still awed by the magnificent talent and effort of a burdened mind struggling to free humanity from the shackles of an impoverished self-love, and the myths to which he believes it gave birth.”
“[A] deeply informative biography . . . situates the poet in his time and place, tracing the effect of both contemporary history and wild nature on his work.” —Edwin Cranston, Harvard University The precipitous cliffs, rolling headlands, and rocky inlets of the California coast come alive in the poetry of John Robinson Jeffers, an icon of the environmental movement. In this concise and accessible biography, Jeffers scholar James Karman reveals deep insights into this passionate and complex figure and establishes Jeffers as a leading American poet of prophetic vision. In a move that would define his life’s work, Jeffers’ family relocated to California from Pennsylvania in 1903 when he was sixteen. At the height of his popularity in the 1920s and 1930s, Jeffers became one of the few poets ever featured on the cover of Time magazine, and posthumously put on a U.S. postage stamp. Writing by kerosene lamp in a granite tower that he had built himself, his vivid and descriptive poetry of the coast evoked the difficulty and beauty of the wild and inspired photographers such as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. He was known for long narrative blank verse that shook up the national literary scene, but in the 1940s his interest in the Greek classics led to several adaptations which were staged on Broadway to great success. Inspiring later artists from Charles Bukowski to Czeslaw Milosz and even the Beach Boys, Robinson Jeffers’ contribution to American letters is skillfully brought back out of the shadows of history in this compelling biography of a complex man of poetic genius who wrote so powerfully of the astonishing beauty of nature.
Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime is the most comprehensive and most substantial critical work ever devoted to the major American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962). Jeffers, the best known poet of California and the American West, particularly valorized the Big Sur region, making it his own as Frost did New England and Faulkner, Mississippi, and connecting it to the wider tradition of the American sublime in Emerson, Thoreau, and John Muir. The book also links Jeffers to a Puritan sublime in early American verse and explores his response to the Darwinian and Freudian revolutions and his engagement with modern astronomy. This discussion leads to a broad consideration of Jeffers' focus on the figure of Christ as emblematic of the human aspiration toward God—a God whom Jeffers defines not in Christian terms but in those of an older materialist pantheism and of modern science. The later sections of the book develop a conspectus of the democratic sublime that addresses American exceptionalism through the prism of Jeffers' Jeffersonian ethos. A final chapter places Jeffers' poetic thought in the larger cosmological perspective he sought in his late works.
American Poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) was educated in the classics from an early age and published his first book of poetry in 1912. Most of Jeffers' work is distinguished by strong elemental narratives set in the California Carmel/Big Sur area. His imagery often puts the rugged beauty of the landscape in opposition to the degraded and introverted condition of modern humanity. Jeffers' themes draw on classical and biblical sources from his early education, and his strong interest in Nietzsche's concept of individualism. Many of his contemporaries erroneously regarded him as a nihilist. This collection of essays attempts to illustrate the art and complexity of Jeffers, while presenting new insights into his work and its perception among his contemporaries. The essayists are Robert Brophy, Alex Vardamis, Robert Zaller, Terry Beers, Tim Hunt, David J. Rothman, Alan Soldofsky, Kirk Glaser, and William Everson. The essays represent a range of critical points of entry-some are on the cutting-edge of criticism and break new ground, others attempt to place Jeffers in the established perspectives of Western civilization's Christian humanism and American poetry's landscape-centered mysticism. The collection constitutes some of the most conversant and active research in the field of Jeffers studies. The critiques speak to the nature of Jeffer's poetry- how it challenged both the minds and hearts of its readers and prompted them to carefully define their own values and authentically find their own center.