Robinson Jeffers — Early Poetry

January 10, 1887, Allegheny (now Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania–January 20, 1962, Carmel, California

Robinson Jeffers’s first three books capture a poet transforming himself in public. Flagons and Apples offers songs, love poems, classical addresses, and tightly measured lyrics; Californians opens into stories of farms, mountain cabins, marriages, labor, and grief; Tamar and Other Poems changes the scale entirely, setting family catastrophe against animals, stone, weather, and geological time. The transformation began during Jeffers’s Los Angeles years, when his relationship with Una Call Kuster overturned both their lives, and continued after they settled in Carmel and built Tor House. By 1924 the inherited music of the early books had hardened into the long lines and uncompromising coastal vision that made Jeffers famous. Presenting the three volumes as distinct stages, this edition lets readers encounter that development instead of treating the mature poet as inevitable from the start.

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Catalogue

Independent Los Angeles Modernisms

Associations

George Sterling Circle Modernism

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Bibliography

Jeffers, Robinson. Flagons and Apples. Grafton Publishing Company, 1912.

———. Californians. Macmillan, 1916.

———. Tamar and Other Poems. Peter G. Boyle, 1924.

———. Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems. Boni & Liveright, 1925.

———. The Women at Point Sur. Liveright, 1927.

———. Cawdor and Other Poems. Liveright, 1928.

———. Dear Judas and Other Poems. Liveright, 1929.

———. Descent to the Dead: Poems Written in Ireland and Great Britain. Random House, 1931.

———. Thurso’s Landing and Other Poems. Liveright, 1932.

———. Give Your Heart to the Hawks and Other Poems. Random House, 1933.

———. Solstice and Other Poems. Random House, 1935.

———. Such Counsels You Gave to Me and Other Poems. Random House, 1937.

———. The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Random House, 1938.

———. Be Angry at the Sun and Other Poems. Random House, 1941.

———. Medea. Random House, 1946.

———. The Double Axe and Other Poems. Random House, 1948.

———. Hungerfield and Other Poems. Random House, 1954.

———. The Beginning and the End and Other Poems. Random House, 1963.

———. The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Edited by Tim Hunt. 5 vols. Stanford University Press, 1988–2001.

———. The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers. Edited by James Karman. 3 vols. Stanford University Press, 2009–2015.

Works About the Author

Academy of American Poets. “Robinson Jeffers.” Biographical overview and selected poems.

Alberts, S. S. A Bibliography of the Works of Robinson Jeffers. Random House, 1933; revised editions.

Hunt, Tim. “A Textual Genealogy of Tamar and Other Poems.” Jeffers Studies, vol. 23, 2025.

Karman, James. Robinson Jeffers: Poet and Prophet. Stanford University Press, 2015.

———, editor. Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers. G. K. Hall, 1990.

Nolte, William H. Rock and Hawk: Robinson Jeffers and the Romantic Agony. University of Georgia Press, 1978.

Powell, Lawrence Clark. Robinson Jeffers: The Man and His Work. Primavera Press, 1934.

Robinson Jeffers Association. “Biography.” Detailed institutional chronology, family history, education, Carmel years, works, controversy, and legacy.

———. “Bibliography.” Chronological primary bibliography and publication record.

Sterling, George. Robinson Jeffers: The Man and the Artist. Book Club of California, 1926.

Tor House Foundation. “History.” History of Tor House, Hawk Tower, Jeffers’s stonework, and preservation of the site.

Zaller, Robert. Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime. Stanford University Press, 2012.

Stefans, Brian. “Los Angeles Poetry from the McCarthy to the Punk Eras.” A History of California Literature, edited by Blake Allmendinger, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 260–80.