American poet John Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) glorified the stern beauties of nature. He saw the human race as doomed and often utilized Greek myths to emphasize man's tragic position in the universe.

Robinson Jeffers was born on Jan. 10, 1887, in Pittsburgh, Pa., where his father taught at Western Theological Seminary. Young Jeffers rejected his father's belief in God but retained the Calvinistic sense of man as depraved and damned. Jeffers was reading Greek by the age of 5, and he attended boarding schools in Switzerland and Germany. He received a bachelor of arts degree in 1905 from Occidental College. He undertook graduate study in the sciences at several universities, studying medicine at the University of California. In 1912 an inheritance freed him to concentrate exclusively on writing poetry.

After his marriage in 1914, Jeffers settled in Carmel, Calif., where he built a stone tower on a lonely cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and...