ROBINSON JEFFERS: A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF HALF
A CENTURY  OF CRITICISM,  1950-1999.

Robert Brophy

INTRODUCTION

The following pages (1 per decade) is certainly not exhaustive, though some attempt was made to make it so. Inevitably some significant articles and book chapters have been inadvertently missed. Minor reviews have been routinely ignored though historically significant ones and some review essays are included. Items judged slight or not contributive by Alex Vardamis’s The Critical Reputation of Robinson Jeffers (1972) have been omitted. Jeffers’s own critical writings are entered (Themes in My Poems and Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years, for instance) as have a few of his notes published in Shebl’s In This Wild Water (1976) and Bennett’s Stone Mason of Tor House (1966). Jeffers’s thoughts on various literary subjects found in Ridgeway’s Selected Letters (1968) are not mined. Ph.D. dissertations and masters’ theses have been entered alongside articles. Both Vardamis’s Critical Reputation and Boswell’s Robinson Jeffers and the Critics (1986) proved useful auxiliary works. Both provide evaluations; Vardamis is stronger, especially in identifying reviewer’s approach (Marxist, Classics scholar, New Critical, Jungian, Freudian, etc.); Boswell provides over eleven years more coverage. Boswell’s abstract-length summaries are frequent-ly referenced at the end of citations by the letter “B” followed by a page number as in, for example, “B33.” In Critical Reputation, Vardamis’s entries are ac-cessed chronologically and according to a threefold division of reviews, articles, and books; individual authors are available through his index. Boswell’s entries are arranged alphabetically; her work provides two short indexes, one for co-authors, editors, translators, and illustrators; the other according to subject.

The following listings contain duplicates: a decision was made to include new publications each year, and these often constitute new appearances of old articles, for instance in a gathering of essays. Thus the total number of articles, chapters, and books is not an accurate indication of the sum of unique contributions. The bibliography relies largely on the prior work of Vardamis, supplemented by that of Boswell, the annual Western American Literature bibli- ography, the index to Robinson Jeffers Newletter (RJN) 1–100, ongoing MLA coverage, and much independent investigation. Serious researchers should be warned that entries need to be double-checked against the original articles lest any errors in transcription be compounded. Rarely, part of a citation will be missing, indicating that in cases where complete information was relatively inaccessible the compiler felt it better to present an incomplete citation rather than none at all.

Somewhere along into the process of compiling, it seemed useful to attach short annotations to the entries, many of them being condensations of ab-stracts provided by others. These brief phrasings are certainly inadequate and may even be misleading; they are no more than poor indicators of content. Yet, judged useful toward selecting items for whatever purpose, these summaries will be augmented as the bibliography is prepared for the Internet.

The Jeffers Studies (JS) page on the World Wide Web <www.jeffers.org> offers a rich menu: (1) current JS articles published electronically and anticipating inclusion in the JS annual issue, (2) an archive of JS past-issue articles, (3) JS reviews, (4) a bibliography of works by Jeffers, (5) a bibliography of biographic and critical works on the poet, (6) a Jeffers chronology, (7) a biographic sketch, (8) an ongoing year-by-year bibliography of pertinent articles, chapters, and books, (9) links to cognate Web sites, including the entire 1,353 pages of A Literary History of the American West (Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1987) which, under Part 2: “Many Wests—Far West,” has an 18-page chapter on Jeffers, and (10) the 60-page index to issues 1–100 (1962–1996) of the Robinson Jeffers Newsletter, the previous “journal of record” for Jeffers studies. The Web site also features a Web page on the Robinson Jeffers Association, RJA’s call for papers, an archive of past RJA conferences, announcements of activities such as the annual essay contest, and a forum for discussion. This bibliography is also available there, to be followed shortly by one covering years 1912–1949.

This listing of books and articles is a project in progress. Besides items you note have been missed, please send corrections of errors to brophy@csulb.edu; these will be integrated into the ongoing Web site version.