SOURCE: An introduction, in The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Vol. 1, Stanford University Press, 1988, pp. xvii-xxviii.

In the essay below, Hunt provides a biographical and critical overview of the Jeffers's life and work, focusing in particular on the poet's rejection of modernism.

By 1914 modernism was already transforming American poetry. Ezra Pound and Imagism were unavoidable presences; [T. S. Eliot's] "Prufrock," as yet unpublished, was four years old; and Wallace Stevens was about to write "Peter Quince" and "Sunday Morning." In 1914, though, Robinson Jeffers was still poetically adrift. Two years younger than Pound, a year older than Eliot, he was still imitating his Romantic and Victorian predecessors. His mature idiom was a full six years in the future, and "Tamar," which would make his reputation, would not be completed until 1923. Even so, by 1914 Jeffers had (by his own report) already made his "final decision not to become a 'modern'...