In 1938 Random House publishedThe Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, a volume that would remain in print for more than fifty years. For decades it drew enough poets, students, and general readers to keep Jeffersin spite of the almost total academic neglect that followed his fame in the 1920s and 1930sa force in American poetry. Now scholars are at last beginning to recognize that he created a significant alternative to the High Modernism of Pound, Eliot, and Stevens. Similarly, contemporary poets who have returned to the narrative poem acknowledge Jeffers to be a major poet, while those exploring California and the American West as literary regions have found in him a foundational figure. Moreover, Jeffers stands as a crucial precursor to contemporary attempts to rethink our practical, ethical, and spiritual obligations to the natural world and the environment. These developments underscore the need for a new selected edition that would, like the 1938 volume, include the long narratives that were to Jeffers his major work, along with the more easily anthologized shorter poems. This new selected edition differs from its predecessor in several ways. When Jeffers shaped the 1938Selected Poetry, he drew from his most productive period (1917-37), but his career was not over yet. In the quarter century that followed, four more volumes of his poetry were published. This new selected edition draws from these later volumes, and it includes a sampling of the poems Jeffers left unpublished, along with several prose pieces in which he reflects on his poetry and poetics. This edition also adopts the texts of the recently completedThe Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers(five volumes, Stanford, 1988-2000). When the poems were originally published, copy editors and typesetters adjusted Jeffers's punctuation, often obscuring the rhythm and pacing of what he actually wrote, and at points even obscuring meaning and nuance. This new selected edition, then, is a much broader, more accurate representation of Jeffers's career than the previousSelected Poetry. Reviews of volumes in The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers "A masterful job of contemporary scholarly editing, this book begins an edition intended to clarify a 'Jeffers canon,' establishing for times to come the verse legacy of a poet who looked on all things with the eyes of eternity."San Francisco Chronicle "This edition will be standard . . . a tribute and justice to a poet whose independent strength has survived to challenge personal and public canons."Virginia Quarterly Review "Jeffers is the last of the major poets of his generationFrost, Stevens, Williams, Pound, Moore, Eliotto get his collected poems. Now that the job is at hand, it is done very well. . . . Tim Hunt has been painstaking in his editorial preparation and judicious in his presentation. . . . A great poet is ready for his due."Philadelphia Inquirer "Few American poets are treated as well by publishers as Jeffers is by Stanford University Press. . . . These poems represent a distinctive voice in the American canon, and it is good to have them so wonderfully set forth."Christian Century

Chapter One

    TO HIS FATHER

Christ was your lord and captain all your life,

He fails the world but you he did not fail,

He led you through all forms of grief and strife

Intact, a man full-armed, he let prevail

Nor outward malice nor the worse-fanged snake

That coils in one's own brain against your calm,

That great rich jewel well guarded for his sake

With coronal age and death like quieting balm.

I Father having followed other guides

And oftener to my hurt no leader at all,

Through years nailed up like dripping panther hides

For trophies on a savage temple wall

Hardly anticipate that reverend stage

Of life, the snow-wreathed honor of extreme age.

    SUICIDE'S STONE

Peace is the heir of dead desire,

Whether abundance killed the cormorant

In a happy hour, or sleep or death

Drowned him deep in dreamy waters,

Peace is the ashes of that fire,

The heir of that king, the inn of that journey.

This last and best and goal: we dead

Hold it so tight you are envious of us

And fear under sunk lids contempt.

Death-day greetings are the sweetest.

Let trumpets roar when a man dies

And rockets fly up, he has found his fortune.

Yet hungering long and pitiably

That way, you shall not reach a finger

To pluck it unripe and before dark

Creep to cover: life broke ten whipstocks

Over my back, broke faith, stole hope,

Before I denounced the covenant of courage.

    DIVINELY SUPERFLUOUS BEAUTY

The storm-dances of gulls, the barking game of seals,

Over and under the ocean ...

Divinely superfluous beauty

Rules the games, presides over destinies, makes trees grow

And hills tower, waves fall.

The incredible beauty of joy

Stars with fire the joining of lips, O let our loves too

Be joined, there is not a maiden

Burns and thirsts for love

More than my blood for you, by the shore of seals while the wings

Weave like a web in the air

Divinely superfluous beauty.

    THE EXCESSES OF GOD

Is it not by his high superfluousness we know

Our God? For to equal a need

Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling

Rainbows over the rain

And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows

On the domes of deep sea-shells,

And make the necessary embrace of breeding

Beautiful also as fire,

Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom

Nor the birds without music:

There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,

The extravagant kindness, the fountain

Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise

If power and desire were perch-mates.

    TO THE STONE-CUTTERS

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated

Challengers of oblivion

Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,

The square-limbed Roman letters

Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well

Builds his monument mockingly;

For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun

Die blind and blacken to the heart:

Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found

The honey of peace in old poems.

    TO THE HOUSE

I am heaping the bones of the old mother

To build us a hold against the host of the air;

Granite the blood-heat of her youth

Held molten in hot darkness against the heart

Hardened to temper under the feet

Of the ocean cavalry that are maned with snow

And march from the remotest west.

This is the primitive rock, here in the wet

Quarry under the shadow of waves

Whose hollows mouthed the dawn; little house each stone

Baptized from that abysmal font

The sea and the secret earth gave bonds to affirm you.

Copyright © 2001 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.