Conclusion

One of my favorite writers of the 20th century is the poet Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers, a Californian, built a stone retreat—Tor House—from which he could contemplate the Pacific Ocean and its metaphysical implications. Through long walks in the rugged Coast Range, Jeffers became intimate with his surroundings and transformed the land's edge into a metaphor for the end of American civilization. Because manifest destiny had reached its continental termination at the California shore, Jeffers prophesied that American culture had climaxed and was thus doomed to collapse like all the great civilizations of the past. ¹