Copyright 1965, Vintage Books, 114 pages

Jeffers’ Selected Poems must be one of my favorite books. Above all else it shows the power of poetry to preserve iconoclastic ideas and shield the poet from persecution. Jeffers comes off as too free-thinking and non-coercive by half, to fit in anywhere in American history as a tolerated commentator.

Jeffers wonderfully strikes to the spiritual root of most of his temporal concerns. His early work is especially instructive to the poet or prose author as it gathers the most basic elements of the scenic world as metaphors for mortality and strife. The title of this review is taken from ‘To The Stone-Cutters’ an epigram with a Homeric tone but entirely anachronistic. It is essentially a warning to the artist that he too is ‘foredoomed’ to oblivion.

I rate his most potent piece as Contemplation of the Sword from April 1938, as he and every thinking American—despite our overburdened mythology of national innocence—knew absolutely that war was coming. As a loner I would have to say he spoke most poignantly to me about the truth of politics with the following:

“Observe them gesticulating,

Observe them going down. The gang serves lies,

the passionate

Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth

Hunts in no pack.”

A particularly cared for Continent’s End, Una, The Excesses of God, and The Sirens.

Robinson Jeffers was a man of vision who wrote about ‘visionless men’, the masses of the damned and their pack leaders. This was a man brought up in an atmosphere of deep Christian devotion with a genius level of insight, who achieved graduation from university at only 15. His work is particularly touching and important to me because a Robinson Jeffers is not possible in our time. Our world cannot reproduce him, or even offer enough of a crack in the clone template to permit him to emerge by accident.

This bit of his work as it stands is a testament to the utility of poetry for the compression and preservation of unpopular ideas.