ABSTRACT
R obinson Jeffers is most often acknowledged as the Californiapoet of Tor House (an edifice of rock he built himself) who immortalizes the stark beauty of the Carmel coastline. Although his works are not well known to most students of American poetry, Jeffers is an important contributor to the Modernist period in American letters and a powerful poet in his own right. Recently, a number of scholars and literary critics have seen fit to revisit the many remarkable poems Jeffers published between 1924 and 1937, his most productive years. Tamar (1924), Roan Stallion (1925), Cawdor (1928), and Solstice (1935) are the volumes that have attracted the most attention. In these as well as his other collections, readers will find a poetic voice deeply engaged with philosophical and aesthetic conflicts that occupied Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, Stephane Mallarrne, and other great Modernists. Most scholars agree that his later works-The Double Axe (1948), Hungerfield (1954), and The Beginning and the End (1963)-generally lack the conviction or intensity of his earlier poems.
