Jeffers, Robinson (1887-1962), was an American poet. He was born John Robinson Jeffers on Jan. 10, 1887, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where his father was a professor at Western Theological Seminary. As a boy, Jeffers studied in Europe at several boarding schools. In 1905, he graduated—at the age of 18—from Occidental College in Los Angeles, having mastered many classical and modern languages. In 1914, Jeffers settled with his wife, Una, in Carmel, California. There, he found dramatic inspiration for his feelings about humanity, and an endless source of symbols to express his feelings.
Jeffers won fame with Tamar (1924), Roan Stallion (1925), Dear Judas (1929), and later collections of verse, as well as a powerful adaptation of Euripides‘s tragedy Medea (1946). But he was indifferent to success and fashionable trends in poetry.
Jeffers regarded human beings as creatures of no significance, largely responsible for their own misery and engaged in a vain struggle against death and darkness. However, a contrasting strain in Jeffers’s philosophy qualified his pessimism. Although the human race is doomed, Jeffers thought, a person may find some peace in the stoic wisdom of the past. And although nature is indifferent to human fate, one person can appreciate nature’s grandeur. Jeffers’s severe view of life may keep him from becoming widely popular. But Jeffers’s mastery of long narrative forms and the extended blank verse line gave him a firm place in modern poetry. He died on Jan. 20, 1962.
