obinson Jeffers perched upon what he clearly liked to think of as the edge of the world and wrote poems. He spent almost the whole of his professional life in Carmel, Calif., in a stone cottage he himself had largely constructed. It heartened and inspired him, as he stared out to sea, to think that he was contemplating a vast emptiness, an expanse where people are ''few enough.'

One could view Jeffers's long career -- his first book was published, privately, in 1912, his last, posthumously, in 1963 -- as a repudiation of his staid background. His father, a Presbyterian minister, cannot have taken much pleasure in the feckless, hopeless, often infuriating, Bible-quoting old men who peopled so many of his son's poems, or in the work's raw, often violent sexuality. In his teens, Jeffers became involved with Una Kuster, the wife of a prominent Los Angeles attorney, and the relationship resulted in her scandalous divorce and eventual marriage to Jeffers in 1913, when he was 26. He foreswore most forms of community life, avoiding civilization as ''the enemy of man'' and a ''transient sickness.'' 

Alternatively, one could see Jeffers's career as vindication of the notion that the fruit -- including the biblical fruit of the Tree of Knowledge -- doesn't fall far from the tree. Like his father, Jeffers delivered sermons. He might well have stood in a high pulpit when delivering lines like these: 

Though joy is better than sorrow joy is not great; 

Peace is great, strength is great. 

Or these: 

The beauty of things was born 

before eyes and sufficient to 

itself; the heartbreaking 

beauty 

Will remain when there is no heart to break for it. 

Or this: 

There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that 

cultures decay, and life's end 

is death. 

There are hints here of an irreverence bordering on blasphemy -- confirming Jeffers's kinship with the Blake who wrote the proverbs of hell, or the Ambrose Bierce of ''The Devil's Dictionary.'' Although Jeffers liked to fulminate no less than any old-time preacher, and though his message shook with fire and brimstone (the death of humankind was a recurrent theme), he was forever subverting the Christian edicts of his upbringing. At the close to perhaps his most famous poem, ''Shine, Perishing Republic,'' the chilly advice he offers his twin sons is typical: 

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever 

servant, insufferable master. 

Love thy neighbor? Not too much; not too well. Instead, love thy environment, Jeffers urged. No American poet seems more tightly bound to a fixed landscape than he to the California coast. It would be hard to say whether his poetic style -- the massed word-clusters and sweeping rhythms -- found in California's massed cliffs and sweeping tides a congenial environment, or whether in fact the environment fashioned the style. It's impossible to conceive of his career removed from the land associated with it. 

Jeffers is also rare among American poets in inspiring what might be called a geographic loyalty: a readership whose devotion is rooted in the appeals of a specific place. In our current literary culture, we're used to encountering allegiances based upon a writer's gender or race or sexual orientation, but ties of geography are generally far less compelling. Jeffers's near contemporary E. E. Cummings, for example, has legions of fans, but few of them, surely, are drawn to him as a Massachusetts poet -- any more than Theodore Roethke's admirers prize him as a Michigander (though he actually wrote memorably about his native state). The loyalty that Jeffers inspires, however, reflects the particular, potent hold that California has on the American imagination -- both as a gorgeous, increasingly endangered coastline and as a revised vantage on our world, one that looks west across the Pacific rather than east across the Atlantic. 

At times, Jeffers's faith in his adopted landscape undoes him, as ''The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers,'' edited by Tim Hunt, amply demonstrates. Too many poems here proceed as if a noble, soaring subject guaranteed a noble, soaring poem; too often, Jeffers invokes, rather than evokes, the majesty of his coastline. (Part of the problem is that at more than 700 pages, this isn't a very selective ''Selected.'' You could stuff into a volume of this size the standard collected works of T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan and John Crowe Ransom and probably have pages left over.) 

An apparent belief that it's sufficient merely to speak of beautiful things, without necessarily putting a beautiful finish upon them, may explain why Jeffers so often settled for inflated but limp expressions of praise and wonderment: ''the incredible beauty of joy,'' ''dreamed the incredible depths,'' ''incredible light flowing up,'' ''incredibly blood-color,'' ''incredible passion,'' ''more incredibly conjugate,'' ''incredible country,'' ''incredible baseness, incredible courage,'' and so forth. He was equally free with ''immense'' and ''magnificent.'' 

There are strikingly few references in Jeffers's work to the writers of the past, and those that do appear tend to belong to the classical Greek rather than the grand English tradition. Although he acknowledged an early debt to Shelley and Milton, Jeffers longed for an altogether different set of forebears. Why couldn't he spring from inorganic sources? 

The dream of poetic abiogenesis dies hard -- the wish that the fundamentals of earthly existence (sun, water, soil, stone) might serve not solely as one's subject matter but as one's progenitors. Jeffers dreamed of being ''born of the rock and the air, not of a woman.'' His rangy, unrhymed lines may recall Edgar Lee Masters for some readers, Whitman for others; certainly one hears biblical cadences in them. But he could hardly be farther in tone from somebody like Eliot, who set his stanzas ringing with a contending clangor of allusive voices. Jeffers was by temperament a solitary. He was eager to expunge other voices from his verse, and would have been content, were it only possible, to silence his own voice as well -- allowing the cliffs and clouds and rolling sea to speak for themselves. 

Within the sea that Jeffers so often writes about, you find a lot of imagery bobbing around in search of an idea. His poems are often weakest at the conclusion, when he seeks to pluck some connective lesson from the ebb and flow of his lines. Sometimes he runs perilously close to telling us that the sea is big, the sun is bright and beauty is beautiful. 

Jeffers's lack of ideas shouldn't necessarily limit him: after all, a poet's first duty isn't to explicate but to sing. But in fact he's seriously hamstrung, largely because, in his determination to sermonize, in his unshakably instructive impulses, he demands to be appraised not as a composer or performer but as a thinker and interpreter. And the truth is, Jeffers makes an unsatisfying guide to the world. 

His broad dislike of his fellow human beings is ultimately wearying. The great literary misanthropists (like Waugh and Swift) strafe their targets with an icy wit; Jeffers bombards them with a heated rancor. (People are a ''contagion of consciousness,'' the ''most repulsive of all hot-blooded animals,'' a ''botched experiment that has run wild and ought to be stopped,'' and so forth.) There's something not so much disturbing as simply disturbed in his gloating vision of humanity as a rapidly passing phenomenon. (He intones this message so often, particularly in the bleak poems written during the Second World War, that it becomes unwittingly comic. We're reminded of that stock character of cartoons, the man carrying a placard announcing ''Repent -- the world is coming to an end.'' Only, in Jeffers's case it's ''Relax -- the world is coming to an end.'') 

His misanthropy is miles away from Cummings's equally off-putting, cloying division of the world into a beauty-blind ''them'' and a flower-loving ''us.'' To be fair to Jeffers -- who, whatever his shortcomings, was nothing but fair -- he instinctively recognized that the only legitimate misanthropy must be democratic, and apparently disliked himself as heartily as he disliked everybody else. There's no reason to doubt him when he says he would have preferred to have been born as his favorite animal and symbol, the hawk. (Jeffers went further: ''I would rather / Be a worm in a wild apple than a son of man.'' That ''wild'' is telling.) 

Jeffers seems, in his poetry, no more capable of insincerity than some boulder lying at the base of a cliff -- and equally incapable, alas, of play and lightness. Reading these pages, I thought repeatedly of Marianne Moore's wonderful line ''Humor saves a few steps, it saves years.'' There's a special sort of claustrophobia, I discovered, induced by prolonged exposure to a mind insusceptible to laughter. 

More surprisingly, Jeffers's view of nature finally looks sentimental. Doubtless he would have bristled at the term. But every epoch has its hidden, irrepressible wellsprings of sentimentality, and it appears that Jeffers (along with a number of splendid 20th-century poets, like Berryman and Larkin) endorsed the covertly romantic notion that if your pronouncements are only dire enough, you must be viewing the world dead on. 

The critic Randall Jarrell once said of Moore -- who, like Jeffers, filled her poems with creatures -- that she ''sent postcards to only the nicer animals.'' Jarrell was, fondly, accusing her of sentimentality. But there is a contrary view of the natural world -- Jeffers's view -- that is no less idealistic, though focused not on ''niceness'' but on ''ferocity.'' Of all God's creatures, it is Homo sapiens that really incenses Jeffers. The hawk's murderous strike is beautiful; the rifle-toting hunter is contemptible. 

A character in one of Jeffers's poems, speaking in a voice indistinguishable from the author's, points out that ''man only in the world, except a few kinds of insect, is essentially cruel''; Jeffers recoils at ''the slavemaker ant, and the slick wasp / That paralyzes living meat for her brood.'' Well, wouldn't this be a kinder world if our most grievous faults were indeed mirrored only in ''a few kinds of insect''? Jeffers's example reminds us that you can denature humanity not only by elevating men and women far above the animal kingdom but also by debasing them, by failing to see how our most regrettable vices -- our wars, our rapes, our indifferent cruelty -- are woven into the natural order. Jeffers revered the autonomous-looking hawk, but scientists now speculate that the least autonomous of all creatures -- parasites -- may in fact outnumber all others. Parasites may be the norm, and the true nature lover is the one whose admiration extends not merely to the hawk but to those furtive, squirming multitudes -- the mites, the ticks, the intestinal worms -- that journey with them. 

In 1924, when Jeffers published ''Tamar: And Other Poems,'' at the age of 37, he established a voice that would characterize him throughout his career. The long title poem, which runs some 70 pages, introduced something new to American narrative poetry, both in its shocking subject matter (incest with multiple partners) and in its dreamlike, feverish, incantatory rhythms, beginning with its opening lines: 

A night the half-moon was like a dancing-girl, 

No, like a drunkard's last half dollar 

Shoved on the polished bar of the eastern hill-range, 

Young Cauldwell rode his pony along the sea-cliff. . . . 

Much of Jeffers's best work was done about this time, poems like ''Natural Music,'' ''To the Rock That Will Be a Cornerstone of the House,'' ''Hurt Hawks,'' ''Tor House,'' ''Give Your Heart to the Hawks.'' This is poetry of an unignorable urgency. Once he found his voice, Jeffers held to it: over the years, the same images kept surfacing (sun-bleached bones, the eyeball of the sea, etc.), and the same themes (acts of violent anger, incest, etc). Jeffers was an obsessive. If we imagine a search conducted by some sophisticated computer of the future -- one that could overlook variant word-choices in order to discern similarities of association -- it would turn up reams of repetition in this ''Selected.'' 

Given how many poems are on display here, conscientious readers are themselves likely to become a species of hawk -- wheeling over the pages with a raptor's eye (though armed with a pencil rather than talons), seeking out choice twists of language, startling affinities. Most of these are in the earlier poems -- like the eagle ''cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders'' or a ''rich-lichened rock'' or a sea that curls up ''like paper in a fire.'' Now and then Jeffers took a universal, timeworn image and brilliantly enlivened it, like this depiction of a bright afternoon: ''And the noise of the sun, / The yellow dog barking in the blue pasture.'' Dour soul though Robinson Jeffers was, I imagine he smiled broadly when he wrote those lines. To declare, in effect, I've heard the sun -- what could have cheered him more? 

Brad Leithauser's fifth novel, ''A Few Corrections,'' was published in April. His novel in verse, ''Darlington's Fall,'' will appear next year.