Some poets build careers. Robinson Jeffers built a house.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1887, the son of a Presbyterian minister and biblical scholar, Jeffers was steeped in scripture and classical languages from boyhood. He graduated from Occidental College at eighteen, met Una Call Kuster as a graduate student, and in 1913 — the day after her divorce was finalised — married her. They moved to Carmel, on the California coast, the landscape that would define everything he wrote.
Tor House and Hawk Tower
In 1919 Jeffers began building a stone cottage above Carmel Bay, naming it Tor House after the craggy knoll it stood on. Beside it he raised Hawk Tower, a forty-foot structure whose every stone he selected and set himself. For the rest of his life he wrote in the mornings and built in the afternoons, and the discipline of stone runs straight through the verse.
A hard, weathered music
His first book, Flagons and Apples, appeared in 1912, but it was Tamar and Other Poems (1924) that made his name. He wrote in a rugged free-verse line descended from Whitman and in probing blank-verse narratives — Tamar, The Women at Point Sur, the much-anthologised Rock and Hawk. By 1932 he was on the cover of Time; in 1946 his version of Medea ran on Broadway. He coined the word inhumanism for his conviction that humankind is too self-absorbed to notice “the astonishing beauty of things.” He died in Carmel in 1962, in the house he had built by hand.