SOURCE: "A Sovereign Voice: The Poetry of Robinson Jeffers," in Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXVII, No. 1, Winter, 1969, pp. 487-507.

In the following essay, Boyers provides a reexamination of Jeffers's poetry, focusing in particular on "the ferocity of the critical reaction against Jeffers" since the late 1940s.

A generation of critics and observers has agreed to bestow upon Robinson Jeffers the gravest sentence the critical imagination can conceive, the conclusion of ultimate irrelevance for both his life and his work. And though Jeffers, dead now since 1962, never gave a damn about either criticism or the critical imagination, nor for that matter about responses to his own poetry, those of us who continue to find in Jeffers a good deal to study and admire ought to speak out a little in his behalf from time to time. The propitiatory ritual need not always be wholly gratuitous, after all, and one has...