The story of this project, at least my part in it, begins October 1984 at that year’s Tor House Festival in Carmel. I hope, before long, to sketch some of that story and call attention to the roles of Lee Jeffers, George White, Norris Pope, Helen Tartar, and others in how the edition came to be and the roles Bill Everson, Ty Harmsen, Commander Allen Mears and others in its development. For now, as a place holder, I’ve pasted in this characterization of the edition from the Stanford University Press web site:
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) is not only the greatest poet that California (and indeed the American West) has produced but a major poet of the twentieth century who occupies a prominent place in the tradition of American prophetic poetry.
Jeffers consciously set himself apart from the poetry of his generation—by physical isolation at his home in Carmel, by his unusual poetic form, and by his stance as an “anti-modernist.” Yet his work represents a profound, and profoundly original, artistic response to problems that shaped modernist poetry and that still perplex poets today. Now, for the first time, all of Jeffers’s completed poems, both published and unpublished, are presented in a single, comprehensive, and textually authoritative edition of five volumes.
Clicking on the cover images above takes you to the Stanford University Press page for that volume.
The links below are to fuller entries (placeholders, alas, for the moment awaiting development) for each volume that include (or will include) the Stanford University Press catalogue description, reviews, and such:
- The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers: Volume One, 1920-1928 (1988)
- The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers: Volume Two, 1928-1938 (1989)
- The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers: Volume Three, 1938-1962 (1991)
- The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers: Volume Four: Poetry 1903-1920, Prose, and Unpublished Writings (2000)
- The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers: Volume Five: Commentary and Critical Apparatus (2001)