Biography Essay

Because he thought "poets lie too much," Robinson Jeffers said in his foreword to The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (1938), he decided "not to pretend to believe in ... irreversible progress; not to say anything because it was popular . . . unless I myself believed it; and not to believe easily." Such skepticism antagonizes some, but Jeffers's descriptions of human misery and unimportance in a divinely beautiful universe have won a remarkably large audience. His 1938 volume, The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, had eleven printings, and the 1935 Modern Library edition of Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems had seventeen (some forty thousand copies); his Medea (1946), with Judith Anderson in the title role, became a success on Broadway in 1947 and then an international success.

John Robinson Jeffers's education began early, before he was three and a half, with tutoring by his mother and then by his father, the Professor of...