ABSTRACT
Robinson Jeffers was born in 1887 in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After stunning initial success, Jeffers found that his high regard for the natural world and low regard for humans combined with his isolationist political stance had earned him the scorn of public taste-makers, especially during the Great Depression and the Second World War. Since his death in 1962, however, he has been hailed as the foremost American poet of environmental politics and a philosopher-poet who, in giving voice to the coastal landscape of the Big Sur area, has set a pattern followed by other writers. He has also taught his readers a different understanding of human relationships to the natural world. Moralists condemned Jeffers' acceptance of violence as an essential aspect of life, and they condemned Jeffers' use of sexual acts, especially his use of incest to illustrate the human obsession with humans and human things to the exclusion of the beauty of the greater outside world.
