Jeffers

It's the birthday of the poet Robinson Jeffers, (books by this author) born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (1887). His father was an Old Testament scholar who taught him Greek and Latin, but from an early age he was also interested in science. He spent his free time either writing poetry or constructing homemade wings with which he attempted to fly. In college, he studied medicine, anatomy, astronomy, and forestry. He was still trying to figure out what to do for a living when he inherited enough money to support himself writing poetry, so he moved to the coast of California and built himself an observation tower so that he could observe the natural world and write about it.
His scientific studies had persuaded him that human beings were just one animal species whose time on earth would be brief, and he explored this idea in his poetry. He wrote,
"[Nature] knows the people are a tide That swells and in time will ebb, and all Their works dissolve ... As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident As the rock and ocean that we were made from."
He was living in his tower, without electricity or plumbing, publishing his books of poetry at his own expense, when an editor chose one of his poems for an anthology of California verse. Jeffers sent the editor his new collection, Tamar and Other Poems (1924), as a thank you gift, and the editor liked it so much that he sent it around to various magazines, where it got great reviews. Jeffers sent all the copies of the book he had to New York, and they immediately sold out.
Within a year, Jeffers was hailed as a genius, compared to Sophocles and Shakespeare and Walt Whitman. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Real estate agents started using his name to sell land in Carmel, California, where he lived.
But after his initial success, he began to write long narrative poems that no one could categorize. They told stories of sex and violence, more like the novels of Faulkner than any poetry being written at the time. Critics didn't know what to make of these poems, and so by the 1940s, Jeffers had sunk back into obscurity. He's been reassessed in the last two decades as possibly one of the greatest American poets of the 20th century. A new collection of his work, The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, came out in 2001.
Robinson Jeffers wrote,
"Man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun Die blind and blacken to the heart:Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts foundThe honey of peace in old poems."