SOURCE: "Spheral Eternity: Time, Form, and Meaning in Robinson Jeffers," in Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers, G. K. Hall & Co., 1990, pp. 252-65.

In the following essay, Zaller discusses Jeffers's narratives in the context of Aristotelian tragedy.

Aristotle, that famous law-giver, laid it down that the action of a tragedy should occur within twenty-four hours. He was thus the first to inscribe an arrow in a circle—the accomplishment of a perfected sequence of events in the orbit of a day's passage. Robinson Jeffers has been faithful, in his fashion, to this dictum; and part of the fascination with ancient tragedy that appears both in his retelling of the Greek stories and in the California narratives that evoke them lies in the tension between human praxis and natural process that Aristotle found in tragedy and saw, with unerring insight, as its essence. To be sure, Jeffers's narratives do not...