Happy New Year everyone! I originally planned to start 2013 with my number one favorite poet, Edgar Allan Poe but I changed my mind and will be saving to feature him in another month.
I was watching Ghost Adventures a couple of weeks ago (had to check YouTube since I can’t catch the show on TV) and they were investigating the Tor House, the former house of Robinson Jeffers. As great of a poet Jeffers is, I’m ashamed to say, I was not familiar with his works. However, the GAC quoted some of his poems and instantly I was hooked.
So for January, I’ll be posting Robinson Jeffers’ poems and I’ll choose the ones that I like the best. Below, like other featured poet, is a brief background of this month’s featured poet.
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John Robinson Jeffers was an American poet, known for his work about the central California coast. Most of Jeffers’ poetry was written in classic narrative and epic form, but today he is also known for his short verse, and considered an icon of the environmental movement.
Jeffers was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh), the son of a Presbyterian minister and biblical scholar, Reverend Dr. William Hamilton Jeffers, and Annie Robinson Tuttle. His brother was Hamilton Jeffers, who became a well-known astronomer, working at Lick Observatory. His family was supportive of his interest in poetry. He traveled through Europe during his youth and attended school in Switzerland. He was a child prodigy, interested in classics and Greek and Latin language and literature. At sixteen he entered Occidental College. At school, he was an avid outdoorsman, and active in the school’s literary society.
After he graduated from Occidental Jeffers went to the University of Southern California to study medicine. He met Una Call Kuster in 1906; she was three years older than he was, a graduate student, and the wife of a Los Angeles attorney. In 1910 he enrolled as a forestry student at the University of Washington in Seattle, a course of study that he abandoned after less than one year, at which time he returned to Los Angeles. Sometime before this, he and Una had begun an affair that became a scandal, reaching the front page of the Los Angeles Times in 1912. After Una spent some time in Europe to quiet things down, the two were married in 1913, and moved to Carmel, California, where Jeffers constructed Tor House and Hawk Tower. The couple had a daughter who died a day after birth in 1914, and then twin sons in 1916. Una died of cancer in 1950. Jeffers died in 1962; an obituary can be found in the New York Times, January 22, 1962.
SOURCE: http://www.poemhunter.com/robinson-jeffers/biography/
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