Robinson Jeffers: A Bibliography of

Criticism, 1912–1949

Robert Brophy

INTRODUCTION

The annotated listing that follows complements Robinson Jeffers: A Bibli-ography of Half a Century of Criticism, 1950–1999 (Jeffers Studies 3.3); to-gether they cover the 20th Century’s critical reflections on the poet. Successive years will be documented in this journal and on the Jeffers web site.

This compilation selects from, uses, and builds on Alex Vardamis’s The     Critical Reputation of Robinson Jeffers (1972) with added help from Jeanetta Boswell’s Robinson Jeffers and the Critics (1986), James Karman’s Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers (1990), S. S. Alberts’s Bibliography (1933), the Index to the Robinson Jeffers Newsletter (1996), various other bibliographic works, and personal research. Jeffers’s comments on critical matters and on his own work are also included. The listing does not intend to be exhaustive. For instance, many entries that Vardamis judges “slight,” “trivial,” and the like are passed over. A number of articles and book chapters from other, diverse sources were excluded for the same reasons and, of course, some potential entries must be presumed simply to have been missed. Reviews are entered when they bear critical weight, carry useful information, or reveal something concerning the critic or the publication. In essence, this gathering presents            a series of annual bibliographies, 1912–1949, recording significant material  published each year, starting with the arrival of Jeffers’s first book. Reprints  are included, usually noted as such. Thus the number of items in no way adds up to an exact count of critical materials retrievable from those thirty-eight years. It seemed useful to attach short summaries, many of them conden-sations of the abstracts provided by Vardamis, Boswell, others, and the compiler’s own research. These brief annotations, usually one or two lines, are certainly inadequate and could even be misleading; they are no more than in-dications of article or book content. Since other bibliographies have been used as sources, serious researchers are reminded that citations should be verified from original sources lest inaccuracies be perpetuated. The compiler wel-comes suggestions of substantial items missed and corrections of errors (write <brophy@csulb.edu> or the editorial address). These will be integrated into the bibliography as it appears at the World Wide Web Jeffers Studies Online site <www.jeffers.org>.

Listing begins with 1912, the year of Jeffers’s first book publication, with a review of Flagons and Apples. Ostensibly by Los Angeles Times staff reviewer William Huntington Wright, the review is by Jeffers himself, submitted under his friend’s byline. For the full text see Robinson Jeffers Newsletter 47: 8–10 or James Karman’s Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers (1990), 35.

Abbreviations: BA = Be Angry at the Sun and Other Poems; CA = Califor-nians; C&OP = Cawdor and Other Poems; DA = The Double Axe and Other Poems; D-D = Descent to the Dead; DJ = Dear Judas and Other Poems; GYH = Give Your Heart to the Hawks and Other Poems; M = Medea; RST = Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems; Sol = Solstice and Other Poems; SC = Such Counsels You Gave to Me and Other Poems; SP = Selected Poetry (1938); T = Tamar and Other Poems; TL=Thurso’s Landing and Other Poems; WPS = The Women at Point Sur; SM = Bennett’s Stone Mason of Tor House (1966); SL = Ridgeway’s Selected Letters (1968).

1912

Wright, Willard Huntington. “The Subtle Passion.” Los Angeles Times: Holiday Book Number 8 December 1912, 17. “First Book.” Colophon (26 May 1932): 1–8. RJN 47 (Dec. 1986): 8–9. [RJ’s review of his own Flagons and Apples: he has come close to saying something new about love; poetry shows traces of Yeats, Swinburne, and Heine; language fluent, some rhythms forced.]

1916

Braithwaite, William S. Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1916 and Yearbook of American Poetry. New York: Gomme, 1916. 238. [Californians has “a distinctive value.”]

Comment on “He Has Fallen in Love with the Mountains.” Literary Digest 53 (2 Dec. 1916): 1484. [Introduces reprint of the poem: RJ is rather severe on humanity; misanthropy and misogyny meant to highlight his love of nature.]

“In the Realm of Bookland.” Overland Monthly 68 (Dec. 1916): 570. [CA: RJ’s bent toward descriptive narrative, a harbinger.]

Jeffers, Robinson. “The Alpine Christ” (unpublished). [It is worth noting that RJ wrote this, his first play, in 1916, at least according to William Everson in the Cayucos Books edition, finally published in 1974 (Una put the date at 1918). Everson’s preface, introduction, afterword, and notes point out RJ’s developing craft at this juncture, especially in the realm of dialogue.]

____. “A Note About Places.” Californians. New York: Macmillan, 1916. 215–17. [RJ describes the Monterey Peninsula historically and geologically, then the Santa Lucia Mountains, forests, and skies; ends with a short glossary or gazetteer of name places, attributing his plots to the nature of the country.]

Wilkinson, Marguerite. “Concerning Another California Poet.” Los Angeles Graphic 49 (11 Nov. 1916): 4. [RJ is in the tradition of California poets.]

1917

“Californians in Poetry.” Republican [Springfield, MA] 18 Jan. 1917, 6. [Compares RJ’s nature poetry with Frost’s.]

Firkins, O. W. “Chez Nous.” Nation 105 (11 Oct. 1917): 400–401. [RJ shows masculinity and pungency of verse, symbolic value in localism, bravado.]

1920

Henderson, W. B. Drayton. Letter from Macmillan Company, 2 Apr. 1920, rejecting an early version of Tamar and Other Poems; see Brides of the South Wind, edited with preface, introduction, afterword, and notes by William Everson. [Cayucos, CA]: Cayucos Books, 1974. [The rejection notes “very unpleasant and fleshy incidents,” “ignoble aspects of life,” “duty to the real and perfect,” and what Macmillan patrons ought not want to read (page 134).]

1922

Bostick, Daisy F., “Carmel and the Creative Arts.” Carmel Pine Cone 6 July 1922, 6. [RJ recognized as a local California poet of note.]

Jeffers, Robinson. “Fragments of the Introduction to ‘Brides of the South Wind.’” Dated by author June 1922; see Alberts (1933). [It is worth noting that “Brides of the South Wind” (unpublished until 1974) gathered into a table of contents much of the poetry that appeared in the 1924 Tamar and Other Poems; commentary on their editorial challenge and value can be found in William Everson’s 1974 Cayucos publication.]

Rede, Kenneth. “Seven Books of Verse.” Baltimore Sun 9 Aug. 1924, 6. [Tamar: “pain-fully crude throughout”; scarcely a redeeming line; abominably printed.]

Rorty, James, and anon. “Across the Editor’s Desk.” Sunset Magazine 53 (Oct. 1924): 51. [“Unique accomplishment in English poetry”; editors call the book “loathesome.”]

1925

Benét, William Rose. “From Pieria to Mediocria.” Outlook 141 (30 Dec. 1925): 674–78. [Difficult to shock the age; “Tamar” powerful.]

B[rickell], H[ershel]. “Books on Our Table.” New York Post 8 Dec. 1925, 14. [“Soul-harrowing . . . a great symphony.”]

Daly, James. “Roots Under the Rocks.” Poetry 26 (Aug. 1925): 278–85. [Genuine passion, ruggedness of imagery, magnificent rhythms.]

Deutsch, Babette. “Brains and Lyrics.” New Republic 43 (27 May 1925): 23–24. [Reading “Tamar” is like Keats looking into Chapman’s Homer; oriental philosophy.]

Jeffers, Robinson. Autobiographical note in “Prospectus: for Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems.” [Facsimile in Alberts. 30. Early memories, education, marriage; Car-mel as “inevitable place.”]

Moore, Virginia. “Two Books.” Voices 5 (Nov. 1925): 70–72. [“Tamar” weak in characterization, lacks subtlety, but power incontrovertible; high voltage.]

“Pacific Headlands.” Time 5 (30 Mar. 1925): 12. [He sings by instinct like Whitman, hurls images, casts spells, dreams beauty.]

Rorty, James. “In Major Mold.” New York Herald Tribune Books 1 Mar. 1925, 1–12. [Unequalled since Robinson; “Tamar” a magnificent tour de force.]

Sterling, George. “Rhymes and Reactions.” Overland Monthly 83 (Nov. 1925): 411. [“Tamar” is strongest and most dreadful poem he’s ever read; serpents around a jar of poison, horrors of life.]

Van Doren, Mark. “First Glance.” Nation 120 (11 Mar. 1925): 268. [Condemns critics and publishers who ignored T; few volumes have such force, genius.]

1926

Auslander, Joseph. “Dark Fire, Black Music.” Measure 61 (Mar. 1926): 14–15. [Vitality, affinity to Whitman, occasionally maudlin, episodic in strategy.]

“Book Notes.” University of Chicago English Journal 15 (Jan. 1926): 86. [“Terrible imaginings . . . bright images.”]

Burgess, R. L. “One Hundred and Three Californians.” Poetry 27 (Jan. 1926): 217–21. [Reviews Continent’s End. Reprinted in San Jose Evening News 4 Feb. 1926, sec. 1: 6. “A very great Californian.”]

Dell, Floyd. “Shell-Shock and the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.” Modern Quarterly 3 (Sept.–Dec. 1926): 268–73. [Marxist rejects RJ’s philosophical pessimism.]

Deutsch, Babette. “Bitterness and Beauty.” New Republic 45 (10 Feb. 1926): 338–39. [Compares RJ with Whitman in form, timelessness, and power.]

Eldridge, Paul. “Literary Shots and Snapshots.” American Monthly 17 (Feb. 1926): 373. [Freudian criticism and comparison with Whitman.]

Farrar, John. “A Furious Poet from Pittsburgh.” Bookman 62 (Jan. 1926): 604. [Amazing powers of expression; lines of great strength and beauty; an unforgettable and thoroughly unpleasant performance; readers will be horrified by magnificent but perverse imagining, yet imparting the quality of Greek myth.]

Fitch,W. T. “Is There Literary and Artistic Culture in California?” Overland Monthly 84 (Dec. 1926): 391, 408. [Protests the Eastern Establishment, using RJ as a case of its slighting.]

Ford, Lillian. “New Major Poet Emerges.” Los Angeles Times 11 Apr. 1926, sec. 3: 34. [Major poet, greatest America has produced; passion and intensity; recalls Christopher Marlowe.]

Humphries, Rolfe. “Hail Cal-i-forn-i-aye.” New York Herald Tribune 7 Feb. 1926, 9. [Marxist critic reviews Continent’s End: RJ is best when least like Whitman.]

Hutchison, Percy. “An Elder Poet and a Young One Greet the New Year.” New York Times Book Review 3 Jan. 1926, 14+. [RJ shows new freedom in use of theme and material, many of his pages equaled only by the great.]

“Jeffers’ Poetry Vivid and Bold: Has Great Power.” Tennyssean (27 Dec. 1925): N. pag. [Reaches grass roots, daring and astounding.]

Jeffers, Robinson. “A Great Poet on Sterling.” Carmel Cymbal 2 (24 Nov. 1926): 8. [RJ as biographical and literary critic. Alberts. 97, 135-36.]

____. “All the Corn in One Barn.” Lights and Shadows from the Lantern 1.7 (Nov. 1926): 1. [Powell. Introduction (1932). 214–15. Alberts. 1933. 97, 133–35. Decision to write only poetry; regrets poetry has lost scope and is inept to deal with real life.]

Lehman, Benjamin H. Review of RST. California Monthly 2.1 (27 Mar. 1926): 37. [Indubitable promise of greatness; rhythms hewn from coast range granite.]

Leitch, Mary. “Books and Letters.” Virginian-Pilot (3 Mar. 1926): 6. [Salacious, a riot of lust; lyricism exquisite.]

Mencken, Henry L. “Books of Verse.” American Mercury 8 (June 1926): 251–54. [Fine and stately dignity, rare virtue of simplicity, promises to be enduring.]

Monroe, Harriet. “Pomp and Power.” Poetry 28 (June 1926): 160–64. [RST: revolting material; lack of taste and restraint.]

“Pagan Horror from Carmel-by-the-Sea.” [San Francisco Catholic] Monitor 67 (9 Jan. 1926): 8. [RJ admired but called “intrinsically terrible” and scarring.]

Seaver, Edwin. “Robinson Jeffers’ Poetry.” Saturday Review of Literature 2 (16 Jan. 1926): 492. [From New Masses founder: RJ a primitive; opposite to Whitman.]

Shipley, Joseph. “Blending of Pity & Horror in Work of Firm-Fisted Poet.” New York Post 17 Apr. 1926, 4. [Compares Whitman, Swinburne, Browning, and Greeks; pity and horror purging the soul.]

Sterling, George. “A Tower by the Sea.” San Francisco Review 1 (Feb.–Mar. 1926): 248–49. [Reprinted in Carmel Cymbal 1 (15 June 1926): 9. Superior to Frost and Robinson; a nova new star.]

____. Robinson Jeffers: The Man and the Artist. New York: Boni and Liverigtht, 1926. [First book-length study; poet friend; laudatory.]

Valentine, Uffington. “The Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.” Argonaut 98 (13 Mar. 1926): 8. [“Sheer horror and wild lubricity”; resembles decadent Ford, Middleton, and Webster.]

1927

“Again Jeffers.” Time 10 (1 Aug. 1927): 31–32. [Gives plot summaries, compares RJ with Homer, Sophocles.]

Auslander, Joseph, and Frank E. Hill. The Winged Horse. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1927. 411. [Brief mention in anthology for young readers.]

Bland, Henry Meade. “The Poetry of Today.” Overland Monthly 85 (Dec. 1927): 373–75. [Criticizes RJ’s pessimism and violence.]

“Book Notices.” University of Chicago English Journal 16 (Nov. 1927): 749. [WPS “a tremendous and terrible novel in verse . . . the glowing intensity of Oedipus.”]

Braithwaite, William Stanley. Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1927 and Yearbook of American Poetry. Boston: Brimmer, 1927. xiv. [Notes WPS; compares RJ with James Branch Cabell.]

Broun, Heywood. Rev. of Sterling’s Robinson Jeffers. Carmel Cymbal 3 (23 Feb. 1929): 16. [Ironic put-down and inaccurate biographical detail regarding RJ.]

Cestre, Charles. “Robinson Jeffers.” Revue Anglo-Americain 4 (Aug. 1927): 489–502. [RJ’s work has mark of great poetry; influence of Whitman and Poe.]

DeCasseres, Benjamin. “Robinson Jeffers: Tragic Terror.” Bookman 66 (Nov. 1927): 262–66. [Extreme adulation, exaggerated claims; Carmel is to Jeffers as Wessex to Hardy.]

Deutsch, Babette. “Or What’s a Heaven For?” New Republic 51 (17 Aug. 1927): 341. [Profundities too obscure; its drama moiled with an irrelevant sordidness.]

Eisenberg, Emmanuel. “A Not So Celestial Choir.” Bookman 46 (Sept. 1927): 102. [RJ’s misanthropy equaled only by Jonathan Swift.]

“Eliot and Crane Give Poetry Grand Style.” Miami [Fla.] News 7 Aug. 1927, 3. [RJ contrasted with them—part agony, part ecstasy.]

Field, Sarah Bard. “Memories of George Sterling.” Overland Monthly 85 (Nov. 1927): 334–35. [Sterling was John the Baptist to RJ’s Christ.]

Gorman, Herbert. ”Jeffers, Metaphysician.” Saturday Review of Literature 4 (17 Sept. 1927): 115–16. [“A core of willful urges, sexual obsessions, fogginess of utterance, undisciplined ardors, prophetic predilections.”]

Hansen, Harry. “The Dark Jeffers.” New York World 19 July 1927, 11. [RJ offers much that is unsavory and uncalled for.]

Hutchison, Percy. “Robinson Jeffers Attempts a New Beauty.” New York Times Book Review 11 Sept. 1927, 5. [WPS not equal to earlier work; lacks restraint, honesty; the bald, reeking confession of a psychopath.]

Jones, Howard Mumford. “Dull Naughtiness.” Chicago News 3 Aug. 1927, 14. [Extraordinary passages but an excess of sex, insanity, and perversity; Jones repudiates the article’s title following Carpenter’s questioning it in American Literature 12 (Mar. 1940): 108.]

Jeffers, Robinson. Answers to Questionnaire “Are Artists People?” New Masses (Jan. 1927): 5–9. [Alberts, 1933. 98, 138–39. SL. 103–04. [RJ: culture is not yet decadent; artists cannot change society; revolutionaries end up exploitative.]

____. “Poetry and Real Poetry.” The Advance 12 (1 Apr. 1927): 12. [Review of Rorty’s Children of the Sun and Other Poems. Alberts. 140–43. [Here is intensity, sympathy, and truth, but RJ rejects Rorty’s revolutionary poems as naïve.]

____. “Song of Triumph.” [Initially unpublished opera libretto for mythic human      apocalypse: Attis dies of self-mutilation; Earth Mother Mara fails in renewing life; stabbed by her father, she dies celebrating the evolution, courage, discoveries, and endurance of humanity; George Antheil to do the music; Otto Kahn to be producer. See SL. 108. RJN 73: 4.]

McClure, John. “Literature and Less.” Times-Picayune [New Orleans] 20 Nov. 1927, 4. [RJ’s poetry lacks the sanity found in excellent poetry.]

Markham, Edwin, ed. The Book of Poetry. Vol. 1. New York: William Wise & Co. 705. [Introduces Jeffers.]

Morrow, Walter. “Jeffers’s Sardonic Smile at Futility of Life is Fanned with Mockery.” Daily Oklahoman 9 Oct. 1927, 15c. [The masses will not care for it.]

Neidhardt, John G. “Hysterics.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch 9 July 1927, 5. [WPS jumbled and pointless, overwrought, incredible caterwauling.]

“Our Bookshelf.” Step Ladder 13 (Nov. 1927): 273. [Calls WPS “literature of putrescence”; contrasts with Hardy.]

“Our Thinking Work.” Chicago Schools Journal 9 (Apr. 1927): 317–18. [Pantheism; compared with Matthew Arnold; sustained excellence.]

Pollard, Lancaster. “Jeffers an Example of Modernism.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer 14 Aug. 1927: 6d. [RS and WPS reveal vivid imagination.]

Ramsay, Joan. Rev. of WPS. Overland Monthly 85 (Nov. 1927): 340–41. [Bitter credo, powerful description, hideous subject matter, leaves exhausted.]

Roedder, Karsten. “Prose Extracts to Test Lyrical Qualities of Two Great Modern American Poets.” Brooklyn Citizen 3 July 1927, 7. [Comparison of RJ’s WPS with E. A. Robinson’s Tristram.]

Rorty, James. “Satirist or Metaphysician?” New Masses 3 (Sept. 1927): 26. [WPS equals dry puppets dancing; RJ’s physical and moral isolation unfortunate and dangerous.]

Traggard, Genieve. “The Deliberate Annihilation.” New York Herald Tribune Books 28 Aug. 1927, 3. [Bothered by RJ’s preoccupation with cruelty.]

Van Doren, Mark. “First Glance.” Nation 125 (27 July 1927): 88. [Wonders at the need to try further in this direction; RJ is knocking his head against the night.]

Wilson, James Southall. “American Poetry—1927.” Virginia Quarterly Review 3 (Oct. 1927): 611–14. [RJ offers sustained interest and vigor but a stench of decadent art.]

Winters, Yvor. “Robinson Jeffers’ Rich but Violent Narrative Poems.” Philadelphia Public Ledger 2 July 1927. [Review of WPS.]

1928

Davis, H. L. “Jeffers Denies Us Twice.” Poetry 31 (Feb. 1928): 274–79. [“The Women at Point Sur” lacks humanity, sympathy, pity, love, but every page is a triumph.]

DeCasseres, Benjamin. “Robinson Jeffers: Tragic Terror.” An Artist. Ed. John S. Mayfield. Austin: privately printed, 1928. [Admiration overflowing.]

Ellis, Havelock. Letter to Jeffers as crusader for sexual freedom. An Artist. Ed. John S. Mayfield. Austin: privately printed, 1928.

Flint, Frank Stewart. “Recent Verse.” Criterion [London] 8 (Dec. 1928): 345–46. [RST: A tragic poet; gripping; imagery, movement, pathos gives intense pleasure.]

Graham, Bessie. The Bookman’s Manual. New York: Bowker, 1928. 186. [“Tragic folk tales of Northern California in epical verse.”]

Hutchison, Percy. “Mr. Robinson Jeffers Brings Hamlet to California” [“Cawdor” brings Theseus and Hippolytus!]. New York Times Book Review 16 Dec. 1928, 2.

Jeffers, Robinson. “The Author Explains.” Cawdor and Other Poems. New York: Horace Liveright, 1928. Dust jacket. [Alberts. 50–51. “Tamar” looks westward; “The Women at Point Sur” looks upward; “Cawdor” looks eastward against the earth; races drizzle away; is the earth amused or sorry; short poems: the common sense of our predicament.]

____. Comments on ‘The Women at Point Sur.” Letter to Rorty, 5 Aug. 1927. Carmelite (12 Dec. 1928): 12. [Adamic (1929). 39. Alberts. 37–39. SL #122. RJ regrets seeming to romanticize immoral freedom in “Tamar”; “The Women at Point Sur” warns of Barclay-like hatred disguised as love, condemns introversion, and urges transvaluation of values; it is tragic exhibition of essential elements, a psychological study of delusion, a study of the origins of religion, and a judgment on a decadent civilization.]

____. “Is the Sky Broken?” New York Tribune Books 2 Dec. 1928, 4. [Review of Van Doren’s Now the Sky and Other Poems. New York: Boni, 1928. Alberts. 99, 147–50. Van Doren’s poetry is atonement between the American earth and its people.]

____. Letter excerpt to Witter Bynner on criticism of WPS. Carmelite (12 Dec. 1928): 4. [Alberts. 39. RJ writes out of conflicts and stresses; is petulant at the broken balance between people and the world.]

____. Note on title poem. An Artist. Austin: John S. Mayfield, 1928, [8]. [Facsimile of title page in Alberts. 46. RJ was reading Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism; it projected a desired independence to the artist.]

____. “The Rhythm.” Carmelite (12 Dec. 1928): 5. [Alberts. 150. Chooses rhythm, not rhyme, number of beats to the line; sources are from physics, biology, pulse, and tides.]

____. “Tragic Themes.” Carmelite (12 Dec. 1928): 5. [Alberts. 150. Every personal story ends in tragedy; comedy is an unfinished story; the impersonal and universal story is never finished and is neither merry nor sad; good and evil are balanced; we are not ill-used.]

Jolas, Eugene. Antholgie de la Nouvelle Poesie Americaine. Paris: Simon Kra, 1928. 186. [Includes translation of “Roan Stallion” with a brief biographical and critical note.]

Kantor, MacKinlay. “Plenty of Sex and Plenty of Bible.” Voices 7 (Feb. 1928): 180–83. [Review of A Miscellany of American Poetry: 1927, in which RJ had key poems not reprinted until 1935.]

Lehman, Benjamin H. Foreword. Poems. San Francisco: Grabhorn, 1928. v–xii. [Su-periority of RJ’s lyrics, authentic and beautiful, informed by neutral science.]

Morris, Lawrence. “Robinson Jeffers: The Tragedy of a Modern Mystic.” New Republic 54 (16 May 1928): 386–90. [Reviews RJ’s books of intensity, passion, and scope of thought; the public has not assimilated him; RJ asks the large questions but ends seeking the peace and oblivion of death.]

O., Y. [A. E., George Russell]. Review of RST. Irish Statesman 11 (24 Nov. 1928): 234, 236. [Primitive, barbaric, vitality of a Whitman.]

Rowntree, Lester. “Flora of the Jeffers Country.” Carmelite 1 (12 Dec. 1928): 10–11. [Botanical data regarding slopes and canyons.]

Salemson, H. J. “A Gallery of Americans.” Poetry 33 (Dec. 1928): 165–66. [Assessment of Eugene Jolas’s Anthology of New American Poetry (above); wide panorama of verse from 126 poets of every school and movement; no evaluation.]

Sandburg, Carl. “The Judgment of His Peers.” Carmelite 1 (12 Dec. 1928): 5. [RJ an equal to Balboa, discovering the Pacific as a literary source.]

Singleton, Anne. “A Major Poet.” New York Herald Tribune Books 23 Dec. 1928, 5. [Most powerful, most challenging poetry of this generation.]

Steffens, Lincoln. “Jeffers the Neighbor.” Carmelite 1 (12 Dec. 1928): 1–3. [RJ’s use of cement in building, life, family, poetry.]

Untermeyer, Louis. Modern American and British Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1928. 221–22. [Compares with Sophocles and Whitman; piles on catastrophes with little humor and less restraint; elemental power.]

Wilson, Edmund. Rev. of 1927 Miscellany. New Republic 53 (8 Feb. 1928): 330. [Gran-diose, original, and distinguished lyrics.]

1929

Adamic, Louis. “Robinson and Una Jeffers: A Portrait of a Great American Poet and His Wife.” San Franciscan 3 (Mar. 1929): 6, 29. [Unquestionably has grown since publishing third-rate story “Mirrors” in the Smart Set in 1913.]

____. Robinson Jeffers: A Portrait. Seattle: U of Washington Bookstore, 1929. [Admiring: “strange verse of excessive intensity and terribleness.”]

Aiken, Conrad. “Unpacking Hearts with Words.” Bookman 68 (Jan. 1929): 576–77. [“Cawdor” a nightmare novel in loose prose-verse; for all its monstrosities and absurdities and excessive use of symbolism, a very interesting thing.]

Arvin, Newton. “The Paradox of Jeffers.” New Freeman 1 (17 May 1930): 230–32. [Review of DJ: poetry too aloof but capable of much.]

Brown, M. Webster. “A Poet Who Studied Medicine.” Medicine Journal-Record 130 (6 Nov. 1929): 535–39. [RJ’s use of medical knowledge in his poetry.]

DeCasseres, Benjamin. The Superman in America. Seattle: U of Washington Bookstore, 1929, 22–25, 27. [A Nietzschean gives high praise; finds in RJ Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Chopin, Blake, Coleridge, De Quincy, Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, D’Annunzio, Dante, Wagner, Nietzsche’s Antichrist and Superman.]

Deutsch, Babette. “Brooding Eagle.” New Republic 57 (16 Jan. 1929): 253. [RJ has lost none of immense power but fails to use it throughout “Cawdor.”]

____. “The Future of Poetry.” New Republic 60 (21 Aug. 1929): 12–15. [RJ, like Yeats, probes theosophical thought, a vision of the universe large enough to inform a long philosophical poem, though terrible.]

Drinkwater, John, William Rose Benét, and Henry Seidel Canby, eds. Twentieth Century Poetry. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929. 379. [RJ is poet of the greatest stature that the Far West can claim; overshadows most writers.]

Ficke, Arthur Davidson. “A Note on the Poetry of Sex.” Sex in Civilization. Eds. Victor Francis Calverton and Samuel Schmalhausen. New York: Macaulay Co., 1929. 666– 67. [Freudian criticism: RJ’s nightmare sex designs repel; his aim is to blast the human universe apart.]

Hale, William Harlen. “Jeffers Refines His Fury.” Yale Daily News Literary Supplement 4 (21 Nov. 1929): 1, 6. [DJ review: vastness, space-straining stature, qualities from Bible, the Greeks, Blake, Whitman, and Milton.]

____. “Robinson Jeffers: A Lone Titan.” Yale Literary Magazine 95 (Dec. 1929): 31–35. [From the Greeks, immutable destiny; from Whitman, mysticism but based on de-spair “under a canopy of endless orbits.”]

Hillyer, Robert. “Five American Poets.” New Adelphi 2 (Mar.–May 1929): 280–82. [Review of RST: his skill professional, his subjects revolting morbidity.]

“Hogarth Living Poets.” [London] Times Literary Supplement 21 Mar. 1929, 239. [Freudian Criticism: RJ describing the unconscious mind; review of RST.]

Hutchison, Percy. “Robinson Jeffers Writes Two Passion Plays.” New York Times Book Review 1 Dec. 1929, 12. [DJ amorphous and muddy, surging line is strong.]

Jeffers, Robinson. Comment on incest as symbol. Adamic (1929). 28. [Alberts. 9. Incest symbolizes racial introversion (in “Tamar,” “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” “The Women at Point Sur”), the founding of values, desires, vision on one’s humanity; cities are incestuous; Barclay’s desire of disciples.]

Johnson, Edward S. “Greece and California.” Yale Daily News Literary Supplement 3 (23 Jan. 1929): 3. [Influence of Greek Drama; does what Frost does for New England and Sandburg for Chicago.]

Kreymborg, Alfred. Our Singing Strength. New York: Coward McCann, 1929. 173, 264, 284, 295, 624–30. [Brief discussion; RJ philosophical antithesis of Whitman.]

McWilliams, Carey. “Robinson Jeffers: An Anti-toxin.” L A Saturday Night 9 (3 Aug. 1929): 5. [Provoking, death-oriented, distasteful, powerful.]

Manly, J. M., and E. Rickert. Contemporary American Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1929. 204–05. [Most powerful recent poet; wide range.]

Munson, Graham. “The Young Critics of the Nineteen Twenties.” Bookman 70 (Dec. 1929): 369–73. [Blossoming new critical talent differently dealing with poets like Jeffers.]

Murphy, Donald. “Savage, Lovely.” Des Moines Register 21 July 1929, 8. [Hard reading, mystical flights, like witnessing a great natural force at work.]

Nicholl, L. T. “New Poetry.” Outlook 152 (27 Nov. 1929): 509. [Review of “Dear Judas” as lights and shadows, “The Loving Shepherdess” as sweet bush among rocks; love and pity.]

O’Neill, George. “Poetry from Four Men.” Outlook 151 (16 Jan. 1929): 110–11. [Symbolism and imagery with the force and irrationality of a dreaming mind.]

Schmalhausen, Samuel D. “Our Disillusioned Poets.” Our Changing Human Nature. New York: Macauley Co., 1929. 165–68. [RJ neither rejected nor accepted America; most audacious and creative of modern poets; burning intelligence.]

Tate. Allen. “American Poetry Since 1920.” Bookman 68 (Jan. 1929): 503–08. [Much published in 1920s, many movements and circles; in the far West RJ stands alone, his gift for narrative unequalled in England or America, has invented a new narrative style; his symbols of inversion and sterility threaten to make themselves America’s.]

Van Doren, Mark. “Bits of Earth and Water.” Nation 128 (9 Jan. 1929): 50. [Imitators of Euripides, Sophocles, Shakespeare usually ridiculous, RJ is not.]

Vivas, Eliseo. “Robinson Jeffers.” New Student 8 (Apr. 1929): 13–14. [Rejects “hysterical claims” for RJ, whose works lack sense of human dignity.]

“Walt Whitman Finds Hellas.” New Statesman 32 (9 Feb. 1929): 572, 574. [“Tamar” on heroic scale; TBT is RJ’s best.]

Zabel, Morton. “The Problem of Tragedy.” Poetry 33 (Mar. 1929): 336–40. [“Cawdor” reveals magnificent nature, technically skilled narrative, full diapason of great power.]

1930

Arvin, Newton. “The Paradox of Jeffers.” New Freeman 1 (17 May 1930): 230–32. [“Dear Judas”: too aloof, lacks affirmation, but promising.]

Conklin, G. Review of Kreymborg’s Our Singing Strength. Bookman 70 (Feb. 1930): 685–86. [Whitman and RJ America’s greatest and most representative poets, most universal prophets.]

Deutsch, Babette. “Sweet Hemlock.” New York Herald Tribune Books 12 Jan. 1930, 4. [Restrained appreciation; RJ offers truth and poetry.]

Dupee, F. W. Review of DJ. Miscellany 1 (Mar. 1930): 34–36. [Characters of “Dear Judas” and “The Loving Shepherdess” more symbolic than real and are mad with disillusionment.]

Eisenberg, Emanuel. “Jeffers Lends Rich Violence to Christ Legend.” New York Post 4 Jan. 1930, 65. [“Dear Judas” too much violence; “beautiful and moving.”]

Hillyer, Robert. “Nine Books of Verse.” New Adelphi 3 (Mar.–May 1930): 232–36. [Re Cawdor: RJ’s works not worth reading except the shorter poems.]

Hughes, Richard. “But This Is Poetry.” Forum 83 (Jan. 1930): vi, viii, x. [DJ: RJ’s narrative imagination would make him a foremost novelist; the public has no taste for narrative verse.]

Humphries, Rolfe. “More About Robinson Jeffers.” New Republic 62 (9 Apr. 1930): 222. [Letter postscript to article: he finds “Dear Judas” in George Moore’s The Brook Kerith (1905) as also “The Loving Shepherdess” related to post-resurrection Jesus in Moore’s book.]

____. “Poet or Prophet?” New Republic 61 (15 Jan. 1930): 228–29. [DJ: symbol, not sense; romanticism gone somewhat rank, unable to project character.]

Johnson, Spud. “She Did It.” Carmelite 3 (29 May 1930): 1, 8–9. [How Mabel Luhan lured RJ to Taos through Una and his sons.]

Jolas, Eugene. “Literature and the New Man.” Transition 19–20 (June 1930): 13–19. [Revised notions of beauty, including monstrous; RJ’s step beyond Calvinism.]

Klein, Herbert Arthur. “A Study of the Prosody of Robinson Jeffers.” Occidental College thesis, 1930. [RJ uses accentual prosody; narrative poems 10 stress and 5 stress; run-on lines; stresses may alternate 4 and 5, 5 and 3, 10 and 6; punctuation eccentric, allowing line to make own rhythm over grammatical structure.]

Kresensky, Raymond. “Beloved Judas.” World Tomorrow 13 (Feb. 1930): 90. [DJ: RJ gives expression to a spiritual understanding of tragedy.]

____. “Fire-Burning Cross.” Christian Century 47 (11 June 1930): 757–58. [Irresistible appeal of the Christ-theme for “apostle of negation.”]

Kreymborg, Alfred, ed. An Anthology of American Poetry: Lyric America, 1630–1930. New York: Tudor Publishing, 1930, 489–95. [Five poems; notes the difficulty of anthologizing RJ since his best is in long poems.]

Lehman, Benjamin. “The Most Significant Tendency in Modern Poetry.” Scripps College Papers 2 (Mar.–Apr. 1930): 1–12. [Reprinted in Saturday Review of Literature 8 (5 Sept. 1931): 97–99. RJ coping with modern science; too negative; needs to trace human proportions of the universe also.]

MacDonald, Dwight. “Robinson Jeffers: I and II.” Miscellany 1 (Aug. and Sept. 1930): 1–10 and 1–24. [Dignity and elevation of verse, brilliant master.]

McWilliams, Carey. The New Regionalism in American Literature. Seattle: U of Washington Book Store, 1930. 20, 27. [RJ not a true regional writer because he lacks antiquarianism, locality of place, a detached viewpoint.]

____. Review of DJ. Los Angeles Saturday Night 10 (25 Jan. 1930): 16. [Prefers “The Coast-Range Christ” and “The Tower Beyond Tragedy.”]

____. “Writers of California.” Bookman 72 (Dec. 1930): 352–59. [RJ towers over California predecessors.]

More, Paul Elmer. “A Revival of Humanism.” Bookman 71 (Mar. 1930): 1–11. [Literature of a universe without purpose degenerates into depictions of sadism.]

Morrison, Theodore. “A Critic and Four Poets.” Atlantic Monthly (Feb. 1930): 24, 26, 28. [“Terrible and harrowing, but full of poetic beauty and power.”]

National Encyclopedia of American Biography. New York: James T. White Co., 1930. 829. [Biographical detail, career, critics.]

Quennell, Peter. “Recent Verse.” Criterion 9 (Jan. 1930): 362. [“Cawdor” disturbing: verse consistently vigorous but its beauties belong to prose.]

Schindler, Duane. “Poet on a Tower.” Survey Geographic (Apr. 1930): 46. [Review of DJ: “The Loving Shepherdess” RJ’s best so far—in feeling, simplicity of utterance.]

Tate, Allen. Rev. of Krymborg’s Our Singing Strength. New Republic 62 (26 Feb. 1930): 511–52. [New Shakespeare must combine Whitman’s love and RJ’s hate.]

Thompson, Alan Reynolds. “The Dilemma of Modern Tragedy.” Humanism in America. Ed. Norman Foerster. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1930. 525–27. [No refuge in il-lusions science shattered; man equals nature, no tragic exaltation.]

Untermeyer, Louis. “Uneasy Death.” Saturday Review of Literature 6 (19 Apr. 1930): 942. [For once RJ allows himself to be kind, in “The Loving Shepherdess.”]

Van Doren, Mark. “Judas, Savior of Jesus.” Nation 130 (1 Jan. 1930): 20–21. [High level of rhetoric in “Dear Judas”; “The Loving Shepherdess” some of RJ’s best work, pathetic, exciting, and beautiful.]

Walton, Eda Lou. Rev. of DJ. Symposium 1 (Jan. 1930): 135–38. [“The Tower Beyond Tragedy” his greatest poem; RS his best book; “The Loving Shepherdess” quality far higher than “Dear Judas”; short poems prosaic and thematic if not dogmatic; yet best passages are torches across a wilderness.]

Winters, Yvor. “Robinson Jeffers.” Poetry 35 (Feb. 1930): 279–86. [RJ has no structural principles; Jesus revolting; no quotable lines; “The Loving Shepherdess” a very Wordsworthian embodiment of a kind of maudlin humanitarianism.]

1931

Blankenship, Russell. American Literature as an Expression of the National Mind. New York: Henry Holt, 1931. 627–32. [RJ a primitive, lacks compassion for suffering; breathtaking vocabulary.]

Bushby, D. Maitland. “Poetry of Our Southern Frontier.” Overland Monthly 89 (Feb. 1931): 41–42, 48. [How East ignores first-rate western poets; RJ a titan, apex found in DJ; psychological approach like Robinson and Masters, outsizes Frost.]

Calverton, Victor F. American Literature at the Crossroads. Seattle: U of Washington Book Store, 1931. 21. [Associated with free verse as are Lowell, Frost, Sandburg, Lindsay, and Whitman; unequivocally American.]

____. “Pathology in Contemporary Literature.” Thinker 4 (Dec. 1931): 7–16. [Marxist sees RJ as symptom of dying civilization; his tragedies pathological, the world as miscarriage of fate.]

Dilly Tante [Stanley Kunitz]. Living Authors. New York: Wilson, 1931. 196–97. [RJ “earned the title of the poet of tragic terror.”]

Dobie, Charles Caldwell. “Literature on the Pacific Coast.” American Writers on American Literature. Ed. John Macy. New York: Liveright, 1931. 414–25. [RJ promises a West Coast future in drama: narratives rely on exaggerated force, sing an endless Dies Irae; his pessimism deprives final force of greatness.]

Gregory, Horace. “Jeffers Writes His Testament in New Poems.” New York Post 31 Dec. 1931, 9. [Marxist critic praises D-D.]

Hicks, Granville. “The Past and Future of William Faulkner.” Bookman 74 (Sept. 1931): 17–24. [RJ is contemporary Faulkner most resembles, paralleling every offense against human law; RJ writes poetry of annihilation, Faulkner the record of thwarted lives and deaths; both seem men possessed.]

Jeffers, Robinson. Notes. Descent to the Dead. Random House, 1931. 29. [Identifies cairns, dolmens, round towers, ridgeways, New Grange, Antrim, Avebury, Stonehenge, Dozmare Pool.] GYH. 151–52. SP. 484.

____. “On Poetry” [letter to Professor McCole, May 1930]. Andrew Smithberger and Camille McCole. On Poetry. New York: Garden City, 1931. 165–66. [RJ can’t define poetry; it needs some verse form, appeal to aesthetic emotion.]

____. “The Stubborn Savior.” New Freeman (25 Mar. 1931): 42. [Review of Babette Deutsch. Epistle to Prometheus. New York: J. Cape & M. Smith, 1931. Alberts. 151–53. Nature of myth; Promethean myth archetype of human will seeking enlightenment and liberation.]

Karo, Leila M. “Robinson Jeffers.” Present-Day American Literature 4 (Mar. 1931): 160–65.

Lanz, Henry. The Physical Basis of Rime: An Essay on the Aesthetics of Sound. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1931. 351. [RJ’s unusual consonanted environment, “n” and “m,” and unaccented vowel in phrases like “humanity is needless.”]

Lawless, Ray M. “Robinson Jeffers: Poet.” Present-Day American Literature 4 (Mar. 1931): 154–60. [Compares in pantheism to Bryant, in horror to Poe, in probing dark secrets of mind to O’Neill, in free verse to Whitman, in philosophy to Melville and Hardy; RJ’s arrival “greatest poetic event in the 1920s.”]

Lehman, Benjamin H. Revision of “The Most Significant Tendency of Modern Poetry” (1930). Saturday Review of Literature 8 (5 Sept. 1931): 97–99.

Lewis, Sinclair. The American Fear of Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931. 15. [In Nobel speech, Lewis deplores RJ’s exclusion from American Academy of Arts and Letters.]

Markham, Edwin, ed. Songs and Stories. Los Angeles: Powell Publishing Co., 1931. 395. [RJ poet of elemental imagination and strange psychological insights.]

Mencken, Henry L. “Market Report: Poetry.” American Mercury 24 (Oct. 1931): 8–9. [America’s dearth of talent except for Jeffers and Hart Crane.]

Powell, Lawrence Clark. “Leaves of Grass and Granite Boulders.” Carmelite 4 (22 Oct. 1931): 8–9. [Compares RJ and Whitman, both nearly home again to Asia.]

Untermeyer, Louis. “Contemporary Poetry.” American Writers on American Literature. Ed. John Macy. New York: Horace Liveright, 1931. 10. [RJ sings “endless Dies Irae”; works miss deepest element of major poetry.]

1932

Alberts, Sidney S. “Jeffers’s Trip to Ireland.” Contempo 3 (25 Oct. 1932): 1, 8. [D-D: volume on death; RJ’s poetry does not thrive on transplanting.]

Austin, Mary. Earth Horizon. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932. 354. [Expects to meet RJ in Taos.]

Belitt, Ben. “Cataclysmic Disaster and High Emotion.” Denver Post 10 Apr. 1932, 6. [Shines with special brilliance in comparison with Frost and Robinson.]

Benét, William Rose. “Jeffers’ Latest Work” [GYH]. Saturday Review of Literature 8 (2 Apr. 1932): 638. [Style loose and prolix, certain qualities of greatness. Reprinted in Canby. Design for Reading: An Anthology Drawn from the Saturday Review of Literature 1924–1937. New York: Macmillan, 1937. 234–38.

____. “Round About Parnassus.” Saturday Review of Literature 8 (16 Jan. 1932): 461. [D-D: range if pondering and power of language.]

Brickell, Herschell. “The Literary Landscape.” North American Review 233 (June 1932): 576. [RJ gazes into the abyss, discerns things in blackness.]

Calverton, Victor F. The Liberation of American Literature. New York: Charles Scrib-ner’s Sons, 1932. 472–74. [Marxist on Jeffers and O’Neill as in despair; never such desperately dooming poetry, such mad, chaotic, crucifying verse.]

Canby, Henry Seidel. “The Pulitzer Prizes.” Saturday Review of Literature 8 (23 Apr. 1932): 677. [The prize should have gone to DJ.]

Cantwell, Robert. “Robinson Jeffers Better Novelist Than Poet.” New York World Telegram 29 Mar. 1932, 23. [Prefers RJ’s ideas to his poetry, as novelist is better than D. H. Lawrence; Lawrence better poet.]

Cunningham, J. V. “Modern Poets.” Commonweal 16 (5 Oct. 1932): 540. [RJ is vendor of loose emotion; expresses only undistinguished exasperation.]

DeCasseres, Benjamin. “Robinson Jeffers.” UNC Daily Tarheel 24 Jan. 1932, 1. [Aes- chylus in Main Street(!) will be read in fifty years with Cabell.]

Deutsch, Babette. “Comfort in Hell.” New York Herald Tribune Books 31 Jan. 1932, 6. [In D-D he has looked on life and death and feared neither.]

____. “The Hunger of Pain.” New York Herald Tribune Books 27 Mar. 1932, 7. [TL: urgency and power, comparable to Shakespeare and Homer, superior to O’Neill.]

Flint, F. S. “Verse Chronicle.” Criterion 11 (Jan. 1932): 276–81. [In the grand manner of the prophets, RJ tells sad stories of the death of gods, kings, and shepherdesses . . . a lonely figure changing the ancient heroic virtues and measures.]

Gibson, W. H., and Philip Horton. “Robinson Jeffers: Pro . . . [and] Con.” Nassau Lit 91 (Nov. 1932): 284–96. [Una’s rebuttal on RJ’s psychoanalysis in Nassau Lit 91 (Jan. 1933): 41.]

Gregory, Horace. “Jeffers Again Hurls Indictment at Civilization.” New York Post 31 Mar. 1932, 9. [Accomplished story-teller, but Spenglerian gloom and its philosophical fallacies threaten to engulf Jeffers entirely on road to suicide.]

Grover, Beth. “Robinson Jeffers Suffers From Being Lionized.” Carmel Pine Cone 15 July 1932, 7. [Danger from increase of visitors; will need a moat or a new island.]

“Harrowed Morrow.” Time 19 (4 Apr. 1932): 63–64 and cover. [TL: some women, even his wife, protest his forbidden themes; but clear vision.]

Hicks, Granville. “A Transient Sickness.” Nation 134 (13 Apr. 1932): 433. [Marxist critic: “Thurso’s Landing” perhaps the most human poem he has written.]

Horton, Philip. “Robinson Jeffers: Con.” Nassau Lit 91 (Nov. 1932): 17–23. [Jungian analysis: RJ lags behind other poets: muddy emotionalism, insularity, intellectual immaturity in light of the day’s problems; deserves condemnation.]

Hughes, Robert N. “Poetic Technique in the Verse of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robinson Jeffers, and Edwin Arlington Robinson.” Ohio State University thesis, 1932. [RJ’s characters individual but not psychologically revealed; scenes source of metaphor and mood; emphasis on wild; conventional metrics.]

Humphries, Rolfe. “Two Books by Jeffers.” Poetry 40 (June 1932): 157. [TL: Marxist    critic rejects RJ’s “arty” response to the world; paralysis of will so great that he can    neither quit crying nor fight back.]

Hutchison, Percy. “New Books of Poetry.” New York Times Book Review 31 Jan. 1932, 11. [D-D: magical in tone and rhythm but philosophically futile as a response to real-ity.]

____. “Robinson Jeffers’s Dramatic Poem of Spiritual Tragedy.” New York Times Book Review April 1932, 2. [Terrifying beauty, more pertinent to life.]

Jeffers, Robinson. Answer to Questionnaire. Letter, 9 Nov. 1932, to Ms. Jeremy Ingalls, appendix to her Tufts University thesis “Metaphysical Aspects of American Poetry.” SL #213. [Values Shelley, Wordsworth, Yeats, Milton, Tennyson, Greek tragedies and lyrics; early reading Swinburne and Rosetti; his philosophy from science, Lucretius, Wordsworth; influence of Shakespeare and King James Bible; Poe and Emerson of interest, never Whitman.]

____. “First Book.” The Colophon 10 (1932): 1–8. [Reprinted in Alberts. 89–90, 153–56.  Elmer Adler, ed. Breaking into Print. 1937. [1–8.] RJ lost mss for Flagons and Apples in a bar and rewrote from memory; difficulty disposing of copies; surprised that CA was accepted; stored unsold copies of T in attic.]

____. Letter response to James Rorty [Apr. 1932]. Alberts. 139n. SL. 140n. [Industrial civilization distorts human nature; loss of earth contact; Communism further in wrong direction; security rots soul; the whole is fated but one can stand apart.]

____. Letter to Herbert Klein regarding thesis on RJ’s prosody. Alberts. 150n. [Stresses counted with regard for quantities of unstressed; no rule; matter of ear and rhythmic sense; English offers verse choices yet untouched.]

____. Remarks on dust jacket regarding poet and friend Sarah Bard Field’s Barabbas. New York: Boni, 1932. [Printed as book review. New York Times 24 Oct. 1932, 16, and in Boni fall 1932 catalog. Alberts. 236. Sees her theme as sublimation of an oppressed people’s rancor.]

Jeffers, Una. “A Correction.” Nassau Lit (Jan. 1933): 41. [RJ “extremely interested in the theories of Freud and Jung,” but can’t affirm therapeutic value; never been psycho-analyzed (as claimed); has extraordinary serenity.]

Johns, Orrick. Carmel Pine Cone 15 Jan. 1932, 5. [No living Irish poet could have made D-D subjects more authentic.]

Knight, Grant C. American Literature and Culture. New York: Long & Smith, 1932. 464, 465, 476–77. [TL a carnival of madness, quality Shakespearean.]

Lewisohn, Ludwig. Expression in America. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932. 583. [Leaves the real power and unconvincing Titanism of RJ to the future.]

Luhan, Mabel Dodge. Lorenzo in Taos. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1932. [Mabel’s efforts to “seduce” Lawrence written as letter to RJ, he being the only artist worthy to be Lawrence’s successor.]

MacDonald, Edward. “Robinson Jeffers’s New Work a Moving Search for Peace.” Phila-delphia Record (27 Mar. 1932): 7. [TL: old sense of disappointment that a lovely hope has been deferred.]

Masters, Edgar Lee. “The Poetry Revival of 1914.” American Mercury 26 (July 1932): 272–80. [“Tamar,” though not from 1914 era, was central; RJ abandoned rhymes and old forms, adopted long line suiting his genius; great imagination, subtlety, courage, and power.]

Monroe, Harriet, and Alice Corbin Henderson. The New Poetry. New edition. New York: Macmillan, 1932. 719–20. [Anthology, notes RJ’s unabashed sincerity, long lines, extreme of horror.]

Pinckney, Josephine. “Jeffers and MacLeish.” Virginia Quarterly Review 8 (July 1932): 443–47. [TL reviewed with Macleish’s Conquistador; sees emphasis on sculptur-esque, masculine, and Saxon qualities.]

Powell, Lawrence Clark. An Introduction to Robinson Jeffers. Imprimerie Bernigaud and Privat, 1932. [U of Dijon dissertation, 1932. Assesses RJ’s narratives, lyrics, style, philosophy; quotes Eliot: RJ “first-rate poet.”]

Rorty, James. “Symbolic Melodrama.” New Republic 71 (18 May 1932): 24–25. [Ex-presses the death-wish of a spent civilization, enthusiasm for basalt and grave maggots.]

Smith, Chard Powers. Pattern and Variation in Poetry. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932. 118, 146, 147–48, 154, 235–37, 316, 366, 383, 387–90. [Discusses RJ’s accents, cadences, pseudo-lines; not free verse; pioneer; compares to Hart Crane.]

Tate, Allen. “A Note on Donne.” New Republic 70 (6 Apr. 1932): 212–13. [RJ part of historical consciousness, performing fusion of literary psychology with fictitious primitivism.]

Thompson, Alan Reynolds. “The Cult of Cruelty.” Bookman 74 (Jan.–Feb. 1932): 477– 87. [RJ outdoes Faulkner in horror but thereby destroys aesthetic distance.]

Towne, Charles H. “A Number of Things.” New York American 1 Apr. 1932, 13. [Compares with Whitman; power to evoke a scene, a sense of loneliness and destruction.]

Untermeyer, Louis. “Five Notable Poets.” Yale Review 21 (Summer 1932): 815–17. [RJ philosophically negative, repetitious, dismal; poetically undeviating, full-throated, remarkable in harrowing drama; poetry we may never forget.]

Walton, Edna Lou. Rev. of D-D. Nation 134 (3 Feb. 1932): 146. [Re TL: complains of RJ’s taste, praises his lyrics’ poetic line.]

Ward, A. C. American Literature 1880–1930. London: Methuen, 1932. 201–02. [Majesty and immensity; love and pity; shock of surprise; poetic voice.]

Winters, Yvor. Rev. of TL. Hound and Horn 5 (July–Sept. 1932): 681, 684–85. [Dogged and soggy melodrama; incapable of the virtues of prose or poetry; an endless, violent monotony of movement, uninteresting, insensitive, hypnotic effect of jolting railroad coach over a bad road-bed; almost wholly trash.]

Zorn, Gremin. “A Novel in Verse.” Long Island Press 10 Apr. 1932, 28. [Compares with Faulkner; title poem “Thurso’s Landing”rich in narrative and imagery.]

1933

Alberts, Sidney Seymour. A Bibliography of the Works of Robinson Jeffers. New York: Random House, 1933. [Primary and secondary material; RJ preface; technical de-scription of each issue; unpublished fragments; uncollected poems.]

Benét, William Rose, ed. Fifty Poets. New York: Duffield & Green, 1933. 87–89. [Poet-selected works; judges RJ’s form loose and elastic; power ever apparent.]

Brooks, Philip. Review of Alberts’s Bibliography (1933). New York Times Book Review 23 July 1933, 2.

Brown, Leonard. “Our Contemporary Poetry.” Sewanee Review 41 (Jan.–Mar. 1933): 43–63. [Dark melodrama; lacks intellectual effort.]

Canby, H. S. “North of Hollywood.” Saturday Review of Literature 10 (7 Oct. 1933): 162. [Reprinted in Seven Years’ Harvest. New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1936, 146–50. In spite of morbidity, poem’s water touched by some angel of judgment.]

Cerwin, Herbert. “How Authors Get That Way.” Carmel Pine Cone 1 Sept. 1933, 1. [RJ gets his best lines when washing dishes or building with stone.]

Eiseley, Loren. “Music of the Mountain.” Voices 67 (Dec.–Jan. 1932–33): 42–47. [RJ and environment; a Whitman gone to land’s end and grown sadder, more sophisticated; skepticism about humanity like Thoreau’s.]

Hicks, Granville. “Trumpet Call.” The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature Since the Civil War. New York: Macmillan, 1933. 263–65. [Marxist discussion of pessimism among modern writers; RJ sees suffering as making humans significant; the capacity to endure, yet is too set on apocalypse.]

Hutchison, Percy. “Sound and Fury in Mr. Jeffers.” New York Times Book Review 15 Oct. 1933, 5. [GYH: Questions RJ’s love of cruelty, symbolized by the hawk, almost a perversion; appalling amounts of blood; nightmarish, succeeding dances of death; but RJ most striking personality in verse today.]

Jeffers, Robinson. Answers to questionnaire from publisher. Alberts, 1933. 232–33. [Birthplace, residence, profession, degrees, ancestry; half unanswered.]

____. Appendix. Jeremy Ingolls. “Metaphysical Aspects of American Poetry.” Tufts University MA thesis, 1933. [Poets and forms most satisfying: Shelley, Wordsworth, Yeats, Milton, Tennyson, Greek tragedy, Greek lyric; read and imitated: those mentioned and Rossetti and Swinburne; philosophy and science: Lucretius and Wordsworth; certainly also Shakespeare and King James Bible; when young: interest in Poe and Emerson, not Whitman. SL #212.]

____. Comment on “Cawdor.” Alberts. 50–51. [SM. 125. “Tamar” looks west; “The Women at Point Sur” looks up; “Cawdor” looks east, reclaiming dignity for human affairs; Indian relics remind of passing cultures.]

____. Comment on ”Dear Judas.” Alberts, 1933. 57. [“Dear Judas” presents only divine figure still living in race’s mind—as hero of a tragedy.]

____. Comment on Descent to the Dead. Alberts, 1933. 69. [Letter to Liveright. Visiting places and not people in Ireland.]

____. Comment on “Give Your Heart to the Hawks.” Alberts, 1933. 78. [Better than “Thurso’s Landing” in dramatic value; hawk symbolic; sequence of thought: “Descent to the Dead” to “Resurrection” to “Helen in Exile” (“At the Fall of an Age”), progressively concerned with death-resurrection theme.]

____. Comment on “The Loving Shepherdess” and “Dear Judas.” Alberts, 1933. 56–57. SL. 144n. SM. 132. [“The Loving Shepherdess” a saint, natural martyr; “Dear Judas” a passion play, with characters embodying aspects of love: nearly pure, pitying, and possessive.]

____. Comments on “Thurso’s Landing.” Alberts, 1933. 72. [14 June 1932 letter to Alberts. Also Rorty, SL. 144n. “Thurso’s Landing” on promontory 30 miles south of Monterey; saw cable and skip in 1914; “Thurso’s Landing” displays courage—voli- tional, imaginative, and instinctive (in Reave Thurso, Helen, and Mother); characters more conscious moral implications of acts.]

____. Comment on “The Tower Beyond Tragedy.” Alberts, 1933. 24, 27. SL #160. [Has Latin and Greek background but classic spirit from English poetry; Jewish actress’s recital of barbaric Scot ballads inspired the play.]

____. Fragments of Introduction to “Brides of the South Wind,” “Fragment One.” Al-berts, 1933. 109–10. [South wind brings rain after drought, moral for fiction, resurrection; glossary on hackamore, vaquero, corral; rejects idea civilization grows young by westward movement; poetry as primitive, a “moral” story brings reader “adjusted balance.” For publication of the RJ volume, see Everson’s edition from Cayucos Books, 1974.]

____. Introduction to “Brides of the South Wind,” “Fragment Two.” Alberts, 1933. 110– 14. [Poet does not create beauty but heralds it; wine and honey are “permanent” as is the human organism, therefore subjects of a poem; poetry more primitive than prose, free verse, poetry’s rhythms tidal; defends use of unpleasant stories, sexual themes; Freudian day-dreams. Dated by poet June 1922.]

____. Note. Fifty Poets: An American Auto-Anthology. Ed. W. R. Benét. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1933. 88. [Circumstances behind composing “To the Stone-Cutters.”]

____. “Remembered Verses.” Alberts, 1933. xv–xvi. [Dismisses juvenilia; was adolescent at 25; recalls Swinburne, Shelley, Milton, Marlowe encountered at 15.]

Nelson, J. H. Contemporary Trends Since 1914. New York: Macmillan, 1933. 490. [RJ’s pessimism from the despair of religion and philosophy in modern world.]

Rorty, James. Review of GYH. Nation 137 (Dec. 1933): 712. [Craftsmanship; ablest performance, but tragedy premised on drunkenness and chance; reader ends racked but unsatisfied.]

Thurston, Lenore. “The Tragic Spirit of Eugene O’Neill, Robinson Jeffers, and Theodore Dreiser.” University of Utah thesis, 1933.

Walton, Eda Lou. “A Poet at Odds with His Own Civilization.” New York Herald Tribune Books 8 Oct. 1933, 6. [RJ distrusts civilization, is a pantheist who hates machines and cities; rejects Marxism and Fascism because they demean, is a “voice in the wilderness,” crying out without purpose.]

1934

Clark, Walter Von Tilburg. “A Study of Robinson Jeffers.” University of Vermont thesis, 1934. [Compares with Wordsworth; disillusion with humans; cosmology of modern science, evolutionary, cyclical, dooming humanity; Greek values.]

Fletcher, John Gould. “The Dilemma of Robinson Jeffers.” Poetry 43 (Mar. 1934): 338– 42. [Only some of the qualities that make Shakespeare, Milton, Aeschylus, or Goethe; deaf to the parrot-cries of the communists demanding social purpose, but own inhuman creed less interesting; characters with strong streaks of neurotic obsession; pompous and inflated absurdity; on self-destruct path.]

Gregory, Horace. “Suicide in the Jungle.” New Masses 25 (13 Feb. 1934): 18–19. [Marxist compares O’Neill and RJ; associates with corrupt society, but RJ is superlative; made the reader see the underside of the American Dream.]

Hatcher, Harlan. “The Torches of Violence.” English Journal 23 (Feb. 1934): 91–99. [RJ and Faulkner leaders in “school of violence,” dwell on error and destruction in morbid fascination; should exalt courage in face of evil.]

Hutchison, Percy. “The Poetry of Robinson Jeffers: A Sound and Careful Study of the   California Poet’s Work and of the Life and Personality Behind It.” New York Times 2 Sept. 1934,  sec.5: 2. [Review of Powell book as painstaking in uninspired style; questions all biographies of living authors.]

Jeffers, Robinson. Foreword. Robinson Jeffers: The Man and His Work. By Lawrence Clark Powell. Los Angeles: Primavera P, 1934. xv–xvii. [No judgment on this book; RJ’s themes are “normal” in dramatic poetry; pain produces stronger emotions; war and religion outmoded topics.]

____. Questionnaire for Geoffrey Grigson. New Verse (Dec. 1934): 18. [Intends poetry to be useful to self and others; influenced by Freud; no stands on political or economic creeds; sees self as no different from ordinary.]

Kreymborg, Alfred. A History of American Poetry. New York: Tudor Publishing, 1934. 624–30. [RJ’s hate for humanity contrasted with Whitman’s love.]

Linn, Robert. “Robinson Jeffers and William Faulkner.” American Spectator Year Book. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1934. 304–07. [RJ and Faulkner’s connection with “harlotry” and Yellow Journalism; appeal to intelligentsia’s prurient and macabre interests; Linn makes up an outrageous plot for an American musical-comedy to       parody RJ and Faulkner.]

Luccock, Halford E. Contemporary American Literature and Religion. Chicago: Willett, Clark, 1934. 28. [Freud and others have taken away moral choice as the source of evil but left guilt; among those so influenced is RJ.]

Matthiessen, F. O. “Yeats and Four American Poets.” Yale Review 23 (Mar. 1934): 611– 17. [“Give Your Heart to the Hawks” far less moving; fundamental confusion of thought vitiates tragedies.]

Powell, Lawrence Clark. Robinson Jeffers: The Man and His Work. Los Angeles: Primavera P, 1934. [Updating of An Introduction (1932); updated, same title, 1940. Still basic introduction to RJ alongside Carpenter’s Robinson Jeffers (1962).]

____. “Robinson Jeffers on Life and Letters.” Westways 26.3 (Mar. 1934): 20–21. [From several interviews: tour of house, library; RJ doesn’t fish, trap, or hunt; looks through brother astronomer’s telescope; doesn’t swim; RJ too deep for his own time.]

Schappes, Morris U. “Robinson Jeffers and Hart Crane: A Study in Social Irony.” Dy-namo (Mar.–Apr. 1934).

Spier, Leonard. “Notes on Robinson Jeffers: A Critical View of a Noted American Poet.” International Literature (Moscow) 6 (1934): 112–17. [RJN 55 (1979): 36–42. RJ an individualist yawping his selfhood, belonging to the spoiled children of the privileged classes.]

Zabel, Morton. “A Prophet in His Wilderness.” New Republic 77 (3 Jan. 1934): 229–30. [Futility and violence; compared with Lawrence and O’Neill; characters will-less; anti-human; themes of revulsion.]

1935

Benét, William Rose. “Phoenix Nest.” Saturday Review of Literature 13 (2 Nov. 1935): 20. [In Solstice, RJ becomes redundant, but  his stoicism is impressive.]

Busch, Niven. “Duel on a Headland.” Saturday Review of Literature 11 (9 Mar. 1935): 533. [RJ’s pessimism seems a possible alternative philosophy for the times.]

Deutsch, Babette. “The Burden of Mystery.” This Modern Poetry. New York: Norton, 1935. 193–99. [Compares RJ with Lawrence and Yeats—themes of incest, love, peace; pitfall of rhetoric, sententious utterance.]

____. “In Love with the Universe.” New York Herald Tribune Books 27 Oct. 1935, 8. [Same power, greater technical variety; eyes fixed on stars.]

Field, Sara Bard. “Beauty Dedicated to Reaction.” Pacific Weekly 3 (Nov. 1935): 226–27. [Friend Sara’s condemnation of RJ’s Sol as irrelevant; Una wrote a rebuttal (ms now at the Huntington Library).]

Holmes, John. Review of Sol. Boston Transcript 19 Oct. 1935, 4. [Rage, violence, unreasoning and inhuman hatred pitched a few notes higher.]

Humphries, Rolfe. “Robinson Jeffers.” Modern Monthly 8 (Jan.–Feb. 1935): 680–89. [Marxist damns RJ’s decadent pessimism, beliefs representative of bourgeois upper-class as it exits; his fatalism serves the governing class.]

Jeffers, Robinson. Comment on the value of poetry. Poetry Ball Program, Academy of American Poets. [SL. #241. SM. 192. Poetry affects life directly, sharpens perceptions and emotions, reconciles to environment, inspires change, enriches life, stands be-tween prose and music, is a test of reality.]

____. “Comment to George Sterling.” The Letters of Western Authors—Number One. [San Francisco]: Book Club of California, Jan. 1935. [Grabhorn pamphlet. Sterling’s qualities: generosity, nobility joined with liberality, thoughtfulness in friendship; his work individual and beaautiful.]

____. “E. A. Robinson.” College Verse 4.7 (May 1935): 155. [Qualities of Robinson’s life—dignity, reticence, concentration, single-mindedness; work valued as delicate, firm, profound, exactly sincere.]

____. Endorsement of Robin Lampson’s Laughter Out of the Ground. New York: Scribner’s, 1935. Dust jacket. [Verse-novel a large achievement, exciting and inclusive picture of gold migration (California Gold Rush).]

____. Introduction. Roan Stallion and Other Poems. New York: Modern Library. vii–x. [Unwilling to revise poems; crisis at age 27; renounced trends and competition; de-cided not to become “modern”; four years later was writing without heed.]

____. Introductory Comment. Robinson Jeffers: 1905-1935 Occidental College Ex-hibit. An Exhibit Commemorating the Thirtieth Anniversary of His Graduation    from Occidental College. Los Angeles: Ward Richie,1935. [Looks back for context of years.]

____. Letter to Jake Zeitlin. Facsimile. 22 Mar. 1935. [SL. #240. His pessimism is less than the whole truth of nature; pleasure and pain balance out; RJ’s verses look to the ends of life and how to meet them.]

____. Note for “At the Birth of an Age.” Solstice and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1935. 1–2. [SP. 505–06. Volsung Saga was source; theme: self-contradiction and frustration of Christian culture age; Asian religion imposed on Western aggressive blood; age is ending, poles losing force, ethic succeeds faith; Christian love/agape manifested in philanthropy, liberalism, socialism.]

____. Response to article, “The Beginnings of Jeffers” [see below] by John Moore. Aper-itif 1.11 (Nov. 1935): 2. [SL. #247. RJN 80: 10ff. Denies he ever contemplated marriage with Lenora M; that Helen of Flagons and Apples was she; that he is a pessimist.]

Jeffers, Una. Letter to Sara Bard Field and Erskine Scott Wood. 13 Nov. 1935. [SL. #248. Responds to Sara’s critical review of Sol in Pacific Weekly noted above: RJ not a reactionary, doesn’t think war and famine are tolerable; USSR is ending in empire and fascism; RJ doesn’t believe in utopias; Sara’s response to Una is at the Huntington Library in the Blanche Matthias papers.]

Moore, John. “The Beginnings of Jeffers.” Aperitif 1.10 (Oct. 1935): 6–13. [Claims RJ’s pessimism comes from being turned down by the family of a former lover ; RJ’s denial noted above.]

Poore. C. G. “Three New Books of Poetry.” New York Times Book Review 30 Oct. 1935, 21. [Compares with Whitman; slights short poems; admires “At the Birth of an Age.”]

Powell, Lawrence Clark. Robinson Jeffers 1905-1935 [catalog]. An Exhibit Commemorating the Thirtieth Anniversary of His Graduation from Occidental College. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie, 1935. [See also updated 1955 exhibit catalog.]

Rice, Philip. “Jeffers and the Tragic Sense.” Nation 41 (3 Oct. 1935): 480–82. [RJ’s ideas resemble “good fascism”; lust for pain like flagellantes.]

Strauss, Kate D. “Robinson Jeffers: Poet of the Decline of the West.” Mills College thesis, 1935. [Petrie, Spengler; main sources nature and science.]

1936

Atkins, Elizabeth. Edna St. Vincent Millay and Her Times. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1936. 245–46. [RJ, along with Eliot, Macleish, and Millay, will be considered a philosophical poet of his time.]

Beach, J. W. The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth Century English Poetry. New York; Macmillan, 1936. 542–46. [RJ’s nature has romantic splendor but also a ruthless nihilism.]

Bennett, Melba Berry. Robinson Jeffers and the Sea. San Francisco: Gelber, Lilienthal, 1936. [Biography; she psychologizes; all RJ’s sea passages surveyed.]

Boynton, Percy. Literature and American Life. Boston: Ginn & Co., 1936. 860–63. [Abysmal depths of defiance and despair; denies all human nobility, sympathy.]

Canby, Henry Seidel. “The Pulitzer Prize Winners.” Saturday Review of Literature (9 May 1936): 6. [Condemns the committee for again passing over RJ; notes the committee no longer claims the prizes go to the best books.]

____. Seven Years’ Harvest. New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1936. 146–50.

DeCasseres, Benjamin. “Robinson Jeffers: Tragic Terror.” The Elect and the Damned. New York: Blackstone Publishers, 1936. 17–27. [Overwhelming praise.]

Gilbert, Rudolph. Shine, Perishing Republic: Robinson Jeffers and the Tragic Sense in Modern Poetry. Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1936. [Extravagant claims and praise; defends against Communists and Philistines.]

Jeffers, Robinson. Endorsement on dust jacket. The Hermaphrodite and Other Poems. By Samuel Loveman. Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1936. [Finds poem memorable for diaphanous pure beauty and love of beauty.]

____. “You ask what is meant by breaking out of humanity” (facsimile). Shine, Perishing Republic: Robinson Jeffers and the Tragic Sense in Modern Poetry. Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1936. Frontispiece. [SL. #169. Means: 1) looking from outside in order to get objective knowledge, 2) having visionary enlightenment, cosmic consciousness, 3) growing out of childish self-regard, 4) rising from a human nature that has become an anachronism.]

Jeffers, Una. Foreword. Robinson Jeffers and the Sea. San Francisco: Gelber, Lilienthal, 1936. vii–viii. [Family’s experience of RJ writing; sea view from Tor House, day-long pilgrimages down the coast, Una’s preference for the sea.]

____. “My Husband.” Sigma Chi Magazine 55.1 (Feb. 1936): 25. [RJ now a volcano, now a Dante.]

Lechlitner, Roth. Review of Sol. New Republic 85 (8 Jan. 1936): 262. [Confusing symbolism, Wagnerian thunder.]

Moore, Merrill. “An Appreciation of Robinson Jeffers.” Sigma Chi Magazine 55.1. (Feb. 1936): 24–28. [Uncritical adulation preceded by (unsigned) “A Great Poet” (pp. 20–23) and a 300-word essay by Una Jeffers, “My Husband,” p. 25.]

Powell, Lawrence Clark. “The Man at Tor House.” Vo Mag (Pasadena Junior College) 4.2 (Mar. 1936): 40–42. [Exalted range and dignity of thought.]

Steffens, Lincoln. Lincoln Steffens Speaking. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936. 77–83. [Neighbor and friend: RJ uses more cement on projects than most builders, as also      on his poetry, his life, and his family.]

Taylor, Walter Fuller. A History of American Letters. Boston: American Book, 1936. 441–44. [The Naturalism of violence in poetry began with RJ; his power owes to the natural grandeur of the California coast, open sky, sheer cliffs, huge redwoods.]

1937

Benét, William Rose. “Jeffers’ Latest Work.” Designed for Reading. Ed. H. S. Canby. New York: Macmillan, 1937. 234–38.

Bogan, Louise. “Landscape with Jeffers.” Nation 155 (23 Oct. 1937): 442. [RJ has Presbyterian disgusts; great talent, but needs humanizing.]

Bush, Douglas. “American Poets.” Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1937. 518–25. [RJ not Greek or Classical; they would consider him “an unbalanced barbarian.”]

“California Hybrid.” Time 30 (18 Oct. 1937): 86–87. [Splendid glimpses of non-human things; RJ both hell-bent prophet and mealy-eyed.]

Deutsch, Babette. “Jeffers’ Tragic Drum-Roll.” New York Herald Tribune Books 31 Oct. 1937, 8. [Strength through use of science and psychology.]

Devoto, Bernard. “Rats, Lice, and Poetry.” Saturday Review of Literature 17 (23 Oct. 1937): 8. [On modern literature’s tendency toward despair: struggle and flight seem the same to RJ.]

Flanner, Hildegarde. “Two Poets: Jeffers and Millay.” New Republic 89 (27 Jan. 1937): 379–82. [Reprinted in Malcolm Cowley. After the Great Tradition. Carbondale: U of Southern Illinois P, 1964. 124–33. Compares RJ and Millay; prefers “The Tower Beyond Tragedy”; characters’ insanity prevents tragedy.]

“Four Forgotten Books Win $2,500 Prizes.” New York Times 30 Jan. 1937, 15. [RJ top winner of votes; includes a tribute from Edna St. Vincent Millay.]

Jack, Peter M. “Mr. Jeffers’ New Version of an Old Scot Ballad.” New York Tribune Book Review (17 Oct. 1937): 4. [Faulty psychology, extreme romanticism, pseudo-science; a witness with Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”]

Jeffers, Robinson. “First Book.” Breaking into Print. Ed. Elmer Adler. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1937. [1–8.] [See Colophon (May 1932).]

Loggins, Vernon. “Questioning Despair.” I Hear America Singing. New York: Thomas Crowell, 1937. 60–70, 74, 229, 309, 319, 351, 354. [RJ’s symbols of rock and hawk; influences of sociology and science; his life and works.]

Rukeyser, Muriel. “Poet’s Page.” New Republic 93 (29 Dec. 1937): 234. [RJ’s mess of ideas shocking; meaningless attacks on mankind’s beliefs.]

Swallow, Alan. “The Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.” Intermountain Review 2 (Fall 1937): 8–9. [Marxist faults RJ for working within bourgeois culture; should have joined the progressive culture.]

Untermeyer, Louis. Review of SC. Saturday Review of Literature 16 (9 Oct. 1937): 11. [Lines passionate and perverse, consolation in transient beauty, will endure new pain and slaveries.]

Warren, Robert Penn. “Jeffers on the Age.” Poetry 49 (Feb. 1937): 279–82. [Review of Sol: no new development, extension, or discovery; much self-imitation; “At the Birth of an Age” most interesting; lyrics fragmentary.]

Winters, Yvor. ”The Experimental School in American Poetry.” Primitivism and Decadence. New York: Arrow Editions, 1937. 15–63. [Reprinted in In Defense of Reason. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1947. 30–74. RJ’s writing is pretentious trash.]

1938

Ashelman, Margaret. “Ethical Fiber of Robinson Jeffers’s Poetry.” Swarthmore College thesis, 1938. [Decay of humanity; values rocks and hawks, the non-human, endurance; death not feared but bridge to inhuman world.]

Benét, William Rose, and Norman Holmes Pearson, eds. “Robinson Jeffers.” Oxford Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 2. New York: Oxford UP, 1938. 1354–83. [Includes “The Tower Beyond Tragedy” and eight poems or excerpts; sees RJ as nay-sayer but powerful like a force of nature, rhythms like waves, descriptive strength, apt metaphor and epithet.]

Clapp, Frederick Mortimer. “Figures in a Coast Range Dance of Death (For R. J.).” Said Before Sunset. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938: 54. [Poem tribute.]

Jeffers, Robinson. Answer to questionnaire for Eugene Jolas. Transition 27 (Apr.–May 1938): 237. [Rarely recalls his dreams; has no daydreams or hallucinations; has never observed his collective unconscious; no need for a new language.]

____. Answer to questionnaire in Volontes (Jan. 1938). [SM notes. Conscience is inculcated—for functioning of social organisms; short-term welfare of nation may be possible, can’t change direction of civilization.]

____. Comment on human values (letter). “Science and the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.” By Hyatt Waggoner. American Literature 10 (Nov. 1938): 284. [SL. #271. It is illusion that traditional values are divinely ordained; but to prefer courage to cowardice, mercy to cruelty, is no illusion.]

____. Comment on the relation of science to the artist and thinker (letter). “Science and the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.” By Hyatt Waggoner. American Literature 10 (Nov. 1938): 284. [SL. #270. Science important but not essential to the artist; limits range and significance; RJ’s father brought him up on The Origin of Species, astronomy, and geology; medical school widened world.]

____. Foreword. Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. New York: Random House, 1938. xiii–xviii. [Modern poetry and art self-limiting; need to reclaim areas of life; need to commit to reader 2,000 years hence; RJ won’t tell lies in verse; influence of wife and coast mountains; origins of “Tamar,” “Roan Stallion,” “The Tower Beyond Tragedy,” “Apology,” “The Loving Shepherdess,” “Thurso’s Landing,” “Give Your Heart to the Hawks,” “At the Birth of an Age.”]

____. Letter to Sister Mary James Power. Poets at Prayer. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1938. 60–61. [SL. #235. Universe one being; parts express same energy communicating with and influencing each other, compels love; humans can contribute but God sufficient without it; tragedy is to show beauty in pain.]

____. Remarks on the individual and society. My America. By Louis Adamic. New York: Harper & Bros., 1938. 474–75. [SL. #242. Individual can find aims; society can only pursue Caesarism; no saving society, no solution in working class or primitivism.]

____. Review on Lawrence Tibbett Award. College Verse (May 1938). [Chosen for its simplicity, ability to raise contemporary life into poetry.]

____. “You Ask Me . . .” (response concerning the Spanish Civil War). Writers Take Sides. New York: League of American Writers, 1938. 3–4. [SL. #276. Would give right hand to prevent the agony, not flick of finger to help either side win; zero tolerance for Italy and Russia intervening; would fight fascism at home, but not in Italy, Germany, Russia, or Spain.]

Jeffers, Una. Letter to Margaret Ashelman for her Swarthmore College thesis (noted above). [SL. #274. Notes RJ’s father, though a recluse, had liberal views, “progressively relaxed in creed and dogma,” and rotated church attendance; RJ’s family ex-perience was prayers, catechism, and Bible reading which affected his language; RJ had no rebellion against religion.]

Jordan-Smith, Paul. Review of SP. Los Angeles Times 11 Dec. 1938, sec. 3: 10. [Most thoroughly American poet; most philosophic since Emerson.]

Millay, Edna St. Vincent. Letter (25 May 1938) to Arthur Davidson Ficke. Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952. 295. [No Pulitzer because of political and moral narrowness of judges; none approve of RJ, clearly by reason of his subject matter.]

Miller, Benjamin T. “A Study in Aesthetic Naturalism.” Pacific School of Religion thesis, 1938. [Study of Meland, Santayana, and Jeffers for metaphysics, mystic naturalism, religious consciousness; RJ metaphysical, deterministic; God non-conscious, non-moral; mysticism sensuous, in nature, indifferent.]

“Nine and Two.” Time 32 (26 Dec. 1938): 41. [Time turns hostile: RJ’s poems “semi-scientific platitudes, unpoetic intensities.”]

Power, Sister Mary James. “Robinson Jeffers Takes God to Task.” Poets at Prayer. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1938. 63–68. [Narrow, sectarian point of view makes for multiple misjudgments of RJ; yet his is the best testament received.]

Quinn, Arthur Hobson, and others, eds. The Literature of America. Vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938. N64. [Anthology of poems, comments on RJ’s “cynical disbelief in civilization.”]

Rodman, Selden, ed. A New Anthology of Modern Poetry. New York: Random House, 1938. 44, 425. [Whitman’s love for country, people, and life has, in RJ, turned to pity, disgust, and hate.]

Van Wyck, William. Robinson Jeffers. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie P, 1938. [Reviews SC; explores RJ’s philosophy.]

Waggoner, Hyatt Howe. “Science and the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.” American Literature 10 (Nov. 1938): 275–88. [Lists sciences RJ uses, but science has left him behind.]

Walton, Eda Lou. “Beauty of Storm Disproportionately.” Poetry 51 (Jan. 1938): 209–13. [RJ shows an antisocial and nihilistic love of violence and power; characters mythic; he repeats himself.]

Wann, Louis. “Robinson Jeffers—Counterpart of Walt Whitman.” Personalist 19 (Summer 1938): 297–308. [Philosophies antithetical; RJ’s achievement consummate.]

1939

Brown, E. K. “The Coast Opposite Humanity.” Canadian Forum 18 (Jan. 1939): 309–10. [Huge and heroic conceptions.]

Conrad, Sherman. Review of SP. Nation 148 (3 June 1939): 651. [Crippling limitations; obsessed by cosmic entropy; dismisses human value.]

“Critics Vote on Best Books of 1938.” Saturday Review of Literature 19 (22 Apr. 1939): 6–7. [Poll of reviewers and editors gave RJ’s SP winning eight votes for Pulitzer, but John Gould Fletcher got the award.]

Fitts, Dudley. “Tragedy or Violence?” Saturday Review of Literature 19 (22 Apr. 1939): 19. [Finds RJ a latter-day Kyd; nihilistic disgust toward people; no approbation; an adept story-teller but out of human dimension.]

Flewelling, R. T. “Tragic Drama—Modern Style.” Personalist 20 (July 1939): 229–40. [Compares Aeschylus’s Oresteia with “The Tower Beyond Tragedy”: belief in fate, the gods, and in mankind’s divinity opposed by belief in science and fatalism.]

Gierasch, Walter. “Robinson Jeffers.” English Journal 28 (Apr. 1939): 284–95. [Examines pessimism, incest, nature, a world few can believe in but must face.]

Greenan, Edith. Of Una Jeffers. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie P, 1939. [Uncritical memoir with many Jeffers anecdotes, but overawed.]

Haydon, A. Eustace. “Robinson Jeffers: Poet-Philosopher.” University Review 5 (Summer 1939): 235–38. [Poet of dis-illusion and cosmic immensities.]

Jeffers, Robinson. Foreword. Of Una Jeffers. By Edith Greenan. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie P. ix. [Uniqueness of two women’s relationship (having common husband/former husband);Una’s quickness to savor life; RJ’s good fortune to have her.]

Lind, L. Robert. “The Crisis in Literature Today.” Sewanee Review 47 (Jan.–Mar. 1939): 35–51. [Compares RJ with Swift: grotesque symbols, intolerable spleen, cul-de-sac in contemporary history; Hebraic thunder, poet as preacher; human nobility lies in will to endure malignities of Nature and men.]

Miller, Benjamin. “The Poetry of Permanence.” Christian Century 61 (1 Mar. 1939): 288. [Christian values in aversion to humanism; distinctly religious dimension found in breaking out of humanity.]

____. “Toward a Christian Philosophy of the Theatre.” Personalist 20 (Oct. 1939): 361– 76. [Uses RJ quotes and “The Answer” to clarify connection between aesthetic and religious experience.]

“The Pulitzer Prizes.” Saturday Review of Literature 20 (6 May 1939): 8. [Repeated protest that RJ is passed over; prize goes to minor poets.]

Schwartz, Delmore. “Sources of Violence.” Poetry 55 (Oct. 1939): 34–38. [GYH: poetry without interest or value; it is hysterical, barren, false, gauche.]

Taylor, Frajam. “The Hawk and the Stone.” Poetry 55 (Oct. 1939): 39–46. [Compares with Nietzsche; RJ’s affirmation is nature; the world is in denial; explicates T and GYH.]

Van Doren, Carl and Mark. “Robinson Jeffers.” American and British Literature Since 1890. New York: Century, 1939. 55–57. [“Tamar” introduced RJ’s themes: murder, incest, slaughter, fire, desperate tenderness; man perverts himself with too much inward thinking; need to love outward.]

Wrubel, David. “Primitivism and Robinson Jeffers: A Survey and a Study.” Columbia University thesis, 1939. [Concern for man’s place in cosmos; violence as value; eternal recurrence.]

1940

Carpenter, Frederic Ives. “Death Comes for Robinson Jeffers.” University Review 7 (Dec. 1940): 97–105. [Reprinted in American Literature and the Dream. New York: Philosophical Library, 1955. 144–54. Confusing title: RJ died in 1962; RJ sees death as not dreaded but a music; life is often evil—thus inverts men’s wisdom.]

____. “The Values of Robinson Jeffers.” American Literature 11 (Jan. 1940): 353–66. [Defends RJ against fascism; RJ sees social action as foredoomed; RJ’s pessimism is Greek; his new values are in discovery of truth and human powers; ignorance is not a value.]

DeVoto, Bernard. “Lycanthropy.” Minority Report. Boston: Little, Brown, 1940. 257–64. [Hemingway’s and RJ’s characters are animals; RJ prefers plants, stone.]

Gilbert, Rudolph. “Robinson Jeffers’s Huge Background.” Carmel Pine Cone 12 Apr. 1940, 5. [Critique of Schwartz and Taylor in 1939 Poetry: example of extreme defensiveness on the part of an admirer.]

Hopkins, Virgil Elizabeth. “A Comparison of the Poetry of Whitman and Jeffers.” University of Washington thesis, 1940.

Jeffers, Robinson. Foreword. Fire and Other Poems. By D. H. Lawrence. [San Francisco]: Book Club of California, 1940. iii–viii. [Lawrence’s genius, use of myth and magic; RJ chooses four “best” poems; Lawrence’s faults in concentration, surface emo-        tion, public speech, Protestantism (missionary zeal, faith in intuition, inner guidance, blood salvation); seeking clue to the labyrinth.]

____. “Thoughts Incidental to a Poem.” Personalist 21 (July 1940): 239–42. [Expands on note to “Solstice” (1935): Christianity foreign to aggressive West, never assimi-lated; core discarded but shows in clashes of love and vengeance, humility and honor, nonresistance and power; classic heroes war with fate, Christian heroes war with themselves.]

Jeffers, Una. “How Carmel Won the Hearts of the Jeffers Family.” Carmel Pine Cone 19 Apr. 1940, 9. [The Jefferses’ early years and experiences in Carmel.]

Jones, Howard Mumford. “Reply to Carpenter.” American Literature 12 (Mar. 1940): 108. [Noted critic protests being misinterpreted as dismissing RJ.]

Luccock, Halford E. American Mirror. New York: Macmillan, 1940. 35, 48, 109, 266–69. [RJ fascist and anti-Christian, acclaims superman immune to ethics.]

Miller, Benjamin. “The Demands of the Religious Consciousness.” Review of Religion 4 (May 1940): 401–15. [Analysis of the poem “Hope Is Not for the Wise.”]

Millett, Fred B. Contemporary American Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940. 149–50, 406–07. [RJ technically impressive but overly violent, barbaric.]

Powell, Lawrence Clark. Robinson Jeffers: The Man and His Work. Pasadena: San Pas-qual P, 1940. [Updates 1934 edition with RJ’s new poems; excellent introduction.]

Wells, Henry W. New Poets From Old: A Study in Literary Genetics. New York: Columbia University P, 1940. 214–30. [Literary influences on RJ: Shakespeare and Elizabethan.]

Wilder, Amos N. “Nihilism of Mr. Robinson Jeffers.” Spiritual Aspects of the New Po-etry. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940. 141–52. [Defends RJ’s mysticism against Winters; RJ shares some Asian religious values; parallels nihilism of Nirvana.]

1941

Brooks, Van Wyck. Opinions of Oliver Alston. New York: Dutton, 1941. 196. [RJ among writers to whom the human heart is vile, life is ugly, and nothing is to be done but raise lamentations.]

Cargill, Oscar. Intellectual America: Ideas on the March. New York: Macmillan, 1941. 741–61. [RJ’s affinity to Shelley; symptomatic of US moral confusion.]

Chapin, Catherine Garrison. “A Letter About Jeffers.” Poetry Society of America. (Mar. 1941): 5–6. [Recalls RJ’s lecture and reading at the Library of Congress.]

Frankenburg, Lloyd. Review of BA. New York Herald Tribune Books 30 Nov. 1941, 7. [RJ is a dramatic poet; doesn’t develop character or incident but uncovers subconscious and primitive layers; climaxes are pits.]

Hobart, John. “Story Behind the Tower Beyond Tragedy.” San Francisco Chronicle, This World 13 July 1941, 18. [Pithy language; RJ’s innate instinct for theater, passionate fierceness.]

Jeffers, Robinson. Note. Be Angry at the Sun. New York: Random House, 1941. vii. [Faces dilemma in obsession with contemporary history; poetry neither private monologue nor public speech, worse for being timely, but must represent the whole mind even preoccupied, no postponing, seek calm at whirlwind’s heart.]

Kunitz, Stanley. “The Day Is a Poem.” Poetry 59 (Dec. 1941): 48–54. [“Mara” repetitious; “Bowl of Blood” magnificent; sees possible fascism.]

Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance. London: Oxford UP, 1941. 339n, 592–93. [Whitman influence but in negation, not optimism; not free verse but complex patterns.]

Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1941. 216, 236– 37. [Sees Yvor Winters’s problem with RJ as theological; verse obviously not trash.]

Short, R. W. “The Tower Beyond Tragedy.” Southern Review 7 (Summer 1941): 132–44. [RJ’s philosophy bogus, artistic sense weak; inconsistent; characters flat: RJ’s canon reflects the sensationalism of a passing generation.]

Watts, Harold J. “Multivalence of Robinson Jeffers.” College English (1941): 109–20. [Three levels: human, passively non-human, and actively non-human.]

____. “Robinson Jeffers and Eating the Serpent.” Sewanee Review 49 (Jan.–Mar. 1941): 39–55. [Sees RJ as a mystic: calls his philosophy “masochistic pantheism.”]

1942

Deutsch, Babette. “Poets and New Poets.” Virginia Quarterly Review 18 (Winter 1942): 132–34. [Detects fascist sympathies; an aging man in an unhappy world.]

____. “The Worst for Being Timely.” New Republic 106 (23 Mar. 1942): 402. [BA: same narrative themes, same aloofness from recurrent human follies and crimes; admires “The Bowl of Blood.”]

Duboise, Novella E. “A Study of Some Parallel Ideas Found in the Literary Works of Edgar Allen Poe and Robinson Jeffers in Light of Scientific Progress.” University of Kentucky thesis, 1942. [Both fear man with science, see one God; Poe sees Newton, Jeffers sees matter and energy and hidden psychology; death is release.]

Gates, G. G. “The Bread That Every Man Must Eat Alone.” College English 4 (Dec. 1942): 170–74. [Neither fascist, nihilist, nor romantic, RJ aims at resolving the inconsis- tency between the individual and his social milieu.]

Ghiselin, Brewster. “Paeonic Measures in English Verse.” Modern Language Notes 57 (May 1942): 338–41. [”The Songs of the Dead Men to the Three Dancers” has every ninth foot a paeon; first three parts are mainly anapestic; RJ gives us accentual verse in new forms.]

Greenberg, Clement. “Robinson Jeffers.” Nation 154 (7 Mar. 1942): 289. [“Mara” especially bad; RJ too narrow to be taken seriously.]

Gregory, Horace, and Marya Zaturenska. “Robinson Jeffers and the Birth of Tragedy.” History of American Poetry 1900–1940. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942. 398–412. [Verse resembles Melville, Whitman; philosophy Nietzschean; “Roan Stallion” an ex-ample of classical rules of unity.]

Holmes, John. “The New Books of Poetry.” New York Times Book Review 22 Feb. 1942, 18. [BA: RJ’s predictions are becoming reality; his violence is today’s fact.]

Kunitz, Stanley, and Howard Haycraft. Twentieth Century Authors. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1942. 722–23. [Unique phenomenon in American and world literature, grand and grandiose, unremitting monotony of doom, fierce genius.]

Miller, Benjamin. Review of BA. Christian Century 59 (3 June 1942): 729. [RJ justified as a prophet; most profound view coming from WW II; passionate disinterestedness.]

Roberts, R. E. “Lonely Eminence.” Saturday Review of Literature 25 (25 Apr. 1942): 8. [“Bowl of Blood” passionate understanding; pity for humanity.]

Untermeyer, Louis. Modern American Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942. 402– 17. [Prints twenty RJ poems; split between poetry and philosophy which is negative, repetitious, dismal; poetry, even bitterest, is varied, vibrant, fecund, finding new patterns.]

____. “Time and These Times.” Yale Review 31 (Winter 1942): 8. [RJ’s misanthropy perhaps justified; “Mara” most vivid of stories.]

1943

Arms, George W. “Jeffers’ Fire on the Hills.” Explicator 1 (May 1943): item 59. [Poem strategies to get reader to accept his violence-justifying conclusion.]

Johnson, William S. “The Savior in the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.” American Literature 15 (May 1943): 159–68. [Examines three types: mythic (Jesus); fictional (Barkley), historical (Wilson, Hitler); good life is found in withdrawal; examines “Meditation on Saviors” as example of RJ’s ambivalence seeking clarity.]

Seubert, Eugene. “Robinson Jeffers: Poet of an Age of Violence.” Studies of the Northwest State Teachers College 7 (1 June 1943): 3–28. [Violence is plot and theme of all RJ narratives; influence of coast and Spengler; RJ reveals an imagination overwhelmed by the events of his day.]

Stovall, Floyd. American Idealism. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1943. 205–209. [RJ’s Greek sources; psychology of subconscious; RJ rejects human ideals, any institution or culture; repudiates humanitarianism, democracy, religion; has hope purely in law of physical nature; his creed: pantheistic materialism; he values freedom.]

Wells, Henry. “Grander Canyons.” The American Way of Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 1943. 148–60. [Landscape’s influence; dramatic, mystical, scientific; naturalism more profound than D. H. Lawrence’s.]

1944

Benét, William Rose. “Poetry’s Last Twenty Years.” Saturday Review of Literature 27 (5 Aug. 1944): 100–04. [RJ our most disillusioned poet of bloody tragedy.]

Coffin, Robert P. “Poetry Today and Tomorrow.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 3 (1944): 59–67. [RJ an example that doubt never produces major poetry—RJ, “be-cause he believes only in death, has written a dead poetry.”]

DeVoto, Bernard. “They Turned Their Backs on America.” Saturday Review of Literature 27 (8 Apr. 1944): 5–8. [The American spirit rejects RJ.]

Gilbert, Rudolph. “Robinson Jeffers: The Philosophical Tragedist.” Four Living Poets [James Daly, Ruth Pitter, E. Merrill Root, and RJ]. Santa Barbara, CA: Unicorn P, 1944. 23–41. [RJ’s mysticism; unity of thought; philosophic insight; lyric skill.]

Wells, Henry W. “A Philosophy of War: The Outlook of Robinson Jeffers.” College English 6 (Nov. 1944): 81–88. [RJ supports WW II through stoicism; sees war as primary metaphor; few poems untouched by it; wars fill the universe; RJ is un-American in his Germanic celebration of violence.]

1945

Cestre, Charles. La Literature Americaine. Paris: Librarie Armand Colin, 1945. 205. [RJ barbaric; characters stoic, violent, brutal; he has a strong voice.]

Cook, Reginald L. “A Meditative Sentinel.” Arizona Quarterly 3 (Summer 1945): 43–45. [RJ not negativist or despairing; human tragedy is from racial inversion.]

Jeffers, Robinson. Comment referring to Prokosch’s The Assassins. Age of Thunder. By Frederick Prokosch. New York: Harper, 1945. dust jacket. [“Lines here express more truth about contemporary history than many whole volumes of recent political comment.”]

Steward, Randall. “American Literature between the Wars.” South Atlantic Quarterly   44 (Oct. 1945): 371–83. [New science was impressed that the universe was doomed; RJ followed; Thomas Wolfe is at opposite pole.]

Tate, Allen. Sixty American Poets 1894–1944. Washington: Library of Congress, 1945. 55–59. [A bibliography; sees RJ’s great power despite Winters.]

Wish, Harvey. Contemporary America: The National Scene Since 1900. New York: Har-per, 1945. 331, 516. [“Tamar”: spiritual decay, sex, introspection.]

1946

Bell, Lisle. Review of M. New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review 21 Apr. 1946, 19. [Authentically dramatic force.]

Bogan, Louise. “The Modern Syndrome.” New Yorker 22 (11 May 1946): 89–91. [Re-printed in Selected Criticism. New York: Noonday P, 1955. 302–04. In M adaptation, RJ’s nightmare world becomes our reality.]

Commins, Saxe. “Medea—The Perennial.” Key Reporter 11 (Summer 1946): 4. [Vigor and eloquence, intensity and psychological penetration.]

Cunningham, Cornelius C. “The Rhythm of Robinson Jeffers’ Poetry as Revealed by Oral Reading.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 32 (Oct. 1946): 351–57. [Reading RJ reveals rhythm of iambic-anapestic duple meter—not in tradition of Whitman or King James Bible but of Swinburne, Aeschylus, and Euripides.]

Fitts, Dudley. “Hellenism of Robinson Jeffers.” Kenyon Review 8 (Autumn 1946): 678– 83. [Reprinted in Ransom. Kenyon Critics. New York: World, 1951. 307–12. RJ in-capable of tragic force of Euripides, lacks insight and control.]

Hackman, Martha. “Whitman, Jeffers, and Freedom.” Prairie Schooner 20 (Fall 1946): 182–84. [RJ not fascist or misanthrope but countercurrent to a culture that identifies security and comfort with freedom.]

Matthiessen, F. O. “Poetry.” Literary History of the United States. One-volume reprint. Eds. Robert L. Spiller et al. New York: Macmillan, 1946. 1347–48. [On decadence of American society, influence of Spengler; RJ neutral recorder, scorned proletariat; despaired of any radical social reform.]

Meyer, G. P. “Medea in California.” Saturday Review of Literature 29 (13 July 1946): 20. [More primitive than Euripides; beautiful clarity and force.]

Mizener, Arthur. “The Medea of the Rocks.” Nation 163 (31 Aug. 1946): 246. [Protests the radical adaptation but admits its success.]

O’Connor, William Van. “Nature and the Anti-Poetic in Modern Poetry.” Journal Of    Aesthetics and Art Criticism 5 (Sept. 1946): 35–44. [A New Critic thinks RJ an escapist, preoccupied with perversion; his tragedy has become pathetic; like Law-rence, he blames man’s dissociation from nature.]

Stauffer, Donald. “California Euripides.” New York Times Book Review 21 Apr. 1946, 7. [Bathos; flat poetry; play might do well with an ambitious actress.]

1947

“Acting Mayor J. J. Hymes of Boston Bans ‘Dear Judas,’ Play Based on Jeffers’ Poem.” New York Times 14 Aug. 1947, 25. [Censor judged it would offend many.]

Atkison, Brooks. “At the Theatre.” New York Times 21 Oct. 1947, 27. [Spares us the supernatural bogeyman of classical Greek drama; gets on briskly with terrifying story of a woman revenge-obsessed; verse modern; words vivid.]

____. “The New Play in Review.” New York Times 6 Oct. 1947, 26. [“Dear Judas”: the rationalization of a sacred theme and difficult to understand.]

Bentley, Eric. The Cult of the Superman. London: Robert Hale, 1947. 117, 227. [RJ is heroic vitalist, akin to Fascists, following Nietzsche to new immortality.]

Brown, John Mason. “Genuine Virtuosity.” Saturday Review of Literature 30 (22 Nov. 1947): 24–27. [RJ’s M streamlines the text to contemporary stage, rids speeches, gives iron quality.]

Cail, Harold C. “Dear Judas Bows at Maine Theatre.” New York Times 5 Aug. 1947, 26. [“Dear Judas” not offensive but controversial; Meyerberg eliminates only one passage as supposedly offensive to Christians.]

“Dances in Dear Judas.” New York Times 19 Oct. 1947, sec. 2: 6. [A Noh play peopled by ghosts revisiting scenes of their passions; theatrical substance given by movement and music.]

Fitzell, Lincoln. “Western Writers.” Sewanee Review 44 (Summer 1947): 530–35. [Flippant, condescending, sneering put-down of RJ from a great height.]

Garland, Robert. “No Power and Glory in Ideological Play.” New York Journal American 6 Oct. 1947, 11. [Blames Meyerberg for failures of “Dear Judas”: inoffensive to Christian; ineffective to critic.]

Gibbs, Wolcott. Review of “Dear Judas.” New Yorker 23 (18 Oct. 1947): 55–57. [Meyerberg’s Bach chorales, dancers, masks, and stylized gyrations mix literary with compelling images, but a play not for the stage.]

Glicksberg, Charles. “The Poetry of Doom and Despair.” Humanist 7 (Aug. 1947): 69–76. [Contrasts Auden with RJ, the most talented poet of modern scientific enlightenment and pessimism.]

Jeffers, Robinson. Comment. American Authors Today. Eds. Whit Burnett and Charles Slatkin. Boston: Ginn, 1947. 301. [RJN 84 (Autumn 1992): 5–6. Remarks two incidents behind poems: a broken-winged hawk (“Hurt Hawks”), an old man at peace (“Promise of Peace”).]

____. Comment. Natural Music. Folio 12. [San Francisco]: Book Club of California, 1947. [RJ at Carmel River in early spring 1920 or 1921; fear, famine, and civil war abroad; recognition that beauty is better than hope.]

____. Endorsement. The Seeming Real. By Frederick Clapp. New York: Harper, 1947. Inside front flap of dust jacket. [Compares Clapp’s poetry to Yeats’s; profound, allusive, ascetic, demanding; no peers in depth and range of thought.]

____. Foreword. Fifty Photographs. By Edward Weston. New York: Duell, Sloane, & Pearce, 1947. 7–10. [Admires Weston’s simplicity and effectiveness, concentration and energy;   photography combines cold machine and hot human energies; art with special qualities; precision, range, instant seeing.]

____. “Preface to ‘Judas.’” New York Times 5 Oct. 1947, sec. 2: 3. [SM. 196–98. Banned in Boston on theological grounds; intent was not to disturb faith; Noh play to depict grand passions; RJ provides a reading of the inner, mental conflicts of gospel characters.]

Levy, William Turner. “Notes on the Prophetic Element in the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.” Columbia University thesis, 1947. [Barclay’s questions; peace in renouncing human values, avoiding corrupting cities, seeking nature.]

Matthiessen, F. O. “American Poetry, 1920–1940.” Sewanee Review 55 (Winter 1947): 24–55. [Irrelevant violence in long poems; descriptive mastery in lyrics.]

Nims, J. F. “Greater Grandeur.” Poetry: A Critical Supplement (Oct. 1947): 5–6. [Explication of poems appearing in Poetry, October 1947.]

Wasserstrom, William. “A Discussion of the Criticism of Robinson Jeffers.” Columbia University thesis, 1947. [Discusses cult critics (Van Doren and Powell); impressionist approach; “sublime school”; modern tastes seek other than RJ.]

Winters, Yvor. In Defense of Reason. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1947. 31–35. [Reprints “The Experimental School in American Poetry.” Primitivism And Decadence. New York: Arrow Editions, 1937. 15–50.]

Zollotow, Sam. “‘Dear Judas’ Trial Opposed in Maine.” New York Times 11 July 1947, 10. [Catholic attorney Francis Sullivan’s strong opposition to play.]

1948

“And Buckets of Blood.” Time 52 (2 Aug. 1948): 79. [DA: faintly theatrical; gloom-wrapped; a necrophiliac nightmare.]

Anderson, Stanley. “Robinson Jeffers Nods and World Marches By.” Cleveland Press 3 Aug. 1948, 20. [Violent political isolationism; RJ breathing but asleep.]

Breton, Maurice. Anthologie de la Poesie Americaine Contemporaine. Paris: Les Editions Denoel, 1948. 48–49, 234–35. [RJ neo-romantic like Anderson and Faulkner.]

Bringham, R. I. “Bitter and Skillful Treatise in Verse.” St. Louis Dispatch 1 Aug. 1948, sec. 6: 4. [RJ is isolated, unbalanced; he appeals to the right-wing nationalists and lunatic fringe, Roosevelt-haters.]

Brown, J. M. “In the Grand Manner.” Seeing More Things. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948. 231–37. [Plays Medea to last drop of cruelty, frenzy, and revenge; text is streamlined; RJ’s language has a driving quality.]

Cray, J. B. “Olympian Judgment.” New York Times 15 Feb. 1948, sec. 2: 3. [Objects to characters and passages left out of the play.]

Cross, Leslie. “Robinson Jeffers vs. Mankind.” Journal [Milwaukee, WI] 24 Oct. 1948, sec. 5: 4. [Deplores DA’s political views; truculent book; poetry stirring and eloquent.]

Dolan, Kathleen T. “Robinson Jeffers: Virile Poet of a Philosophy of Decay.” Columbia University thesis, 1948. [Influence of war, sees civilized decadence; fate determined.]

Dudley, Uncle [Ward Greene]. “The Double Axe.” Boston Globe 5 Sept. 1948, 22. [May be his best work: sword blade dipped in blood.]

Ferril, Thomas Hornsby. “The New Poetry.” San Francisco Chronicle, This World. 7 Nov. 1948, 11. [Love of nature, passion for God, hatred of violence, RJ has saintly kinship with St. Francis.]

Fitts, Dudley. “The Violent Mr. Jeffers.” New York Times Book Review 22 Aug. 1948, 10. [DA: apoplectic shouting; a failure like his Medea.]

Fitzgerald, Robert. “Oracles and Things.” New Republic 119 (22 Nov. 1948): 22. [DA: childish in attitude; a sorry exhibition.]

Freide, Donald. The Mechanical Angel: His Adventures and Enterprises in the Glittering 1920s. New York: Knopf, 1948. 230–31. [RJ’s opera scenario.]

Humphries, Rolfe. “Jeffers and Pound.” Nation 167 (25 Sept. 1948): 349. [Attack on RJ’s “Inhumanism”; he reveals no change or growth; but dignity.]

Jeffers, Robinson. Foreword. Medea. Decca recording, 1948. SM. 216-20. [Compares Greek and Elizabethan tragedy: Euripides a genius; M a warning against presump-tuous superiority of civilization; adaptation for Judith Anderson.]

____. “Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years.” New York Times Magazine 18 Jan. 1948, sec. 6: 16+. [Poetry is not primitive genre, needs no school, tradition, great audience; hypothetical great poet would break from fashionable, learned, and obscure; would aim to be understood a hundred years hence; poetry not meant to civilize.]

____. Preface. The Double Axe and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1948. vii–viii. [Shifting of emphasis from man to not-man; rejection of human solipsism; recognition of transhuman magnificence; neither misanthropic nor pessimistic but truth: reasonable detachment as rule of conduct. The “Original Preface” appears in  1948 Liveright reprint, 171–75.]

Kupferman, Lawrence. “Mail Order Verse.” New York Times 8 Feb. 1948,  sec. 6: 5. [Letter replying to RJ’s “Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years”: he longingly glories in Greece; forgets poets express their age.]

Lechlitner, Ruth. “A Prophet of Mortality.” New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review 12 Sept. 1948, 4. [Questions propriety of publisher’s disclaimer.]

McCarthy, John R. “Jeffers’ Anti-War Fervor.” Pasadena Star-News 25 July 1948, book sec.: 35. [Important statement on eve of Third World War.]

Miles, Josephine. “Pacific Coast Poetry, 1947.” Pacific Spectator 2 (Spring 1948): 134– 150. [Contrasts Yvor Winters’s “To the Holy Spirit” with Jeffers’s “Natural Music,” preferring Winters’s poem/view.]

Nathan, George Jean. Theater Book of the Year: 1947–1948. New York: Knopf, 1948. 77– 80, 104–12. [“Dear Judas” performance misguided and declamatory with sanctimonious staging; M much superior theatrically to the Gilbert Murray translation; grace in treatment; RJ indulges in his quenchless fancy for the grisly.]

O’Connor, William Van. Sense and Sensibility in Modern Poetry. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1948. 25, 50, and passim. [RJ’s poetry close to prose, poetry of “impulses” rather than direction or structure.]

“People Who Read and Write.” New York Times Book Review 3 Oct. 1948, 8. [Sum-marizes critical reception of DA as opposition to political content, unbalanced by appreciation for the poetry.]

“Two Books on Verse.” Bulletin from Virginia Kirkus Bookshop Service 14 (1 June 1948): 276. [Cosmic sarcasm, fascism, part Sophocles, Lone Ranger, and Faulkner.]

1949

Benét, William Rose. “Remembering the Poets: A Reviewer’s Vista.” Saturday Review of Literature 32 (6 Aug. 1949): 109. [Poems of terror and tragedy from the great and savage misanthrope of American poetry.]

Conner, Frederick William. Cosmic Optimism: A Study of the Interpretation of Evolution by American Poets from Emerson to Robinson. Gainesville: U of Florida P, 1949. 332–39. [RJ made cosmic indifference a kind of Nirvana; cosmic optimism being a projection of human values, he prizes the non-human view; salvation is in abandoning humanity, imitating granite.]

Demarest, Michael. “Californians: The Dark Glory.” Script 35 (Feb. 1949): 19–24. [RJ classed with Thomas Hardy, Sophocles, and Jeremiah.]

Flewelling, Ralph. “Tragedy: Greece to California.” Personalist 30 (July 1949): 229–45. [Influence of Greeks on RJ: plumbs depth of moral darkness, a Cassandra.]

Hackman, Martha. Review of DA. Voices 136 (Winter 1949): 54–56. [Too much violence and horror in narratives; lyrics repetitious and flat.]

Powell, Lawrence Clark. Robinson Jeffers: A Lecture to Professor James L. Wortham’s Class in Narrative Poetry Given on May 22, 1949. Los Angeles: Press of Los Angeles City College, 1951. [Overview; out of fashion with New Critics’ ambiguity; such critics are the blind men describing the elephant.]

Roddy, Joseph. “View from a Granite Tower.” Theatre Arts 33 (June 1949): 32–36. [Reviews RJ’s career as a famous dramatist, an outstanding phenomenon.]

Rosenheim, Ned. “One Tiger on the Road.” Poetry 73 (Mar. 1949): 351–54. [Review of DA: prescinds from political themes; finds enormous power in parts of narratives; violence of shorter poems fails the test.]

Van Doren, Mark. “The Poetry of Our Day Expresses Our Doubt and the Times’ Confusion.” New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review 25 Sept. 1949, 9. [Regrets that RJ long ago gave up mankind and continues to find sermons in the stones.]  

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