In epic poems such as Tamar, Jeffers revealed his strong relationship with the wilderness and his dislike of what civilized man had done to it. His epic poems were undoubtedly influenced by his affinity to the Greek classics and were imbued with incest and murder that shook up North American literary society. He built a granite house for his family and quickly became known as a rugged outdoors type who drew his poetry out of the wilderness he loved so much. He showed early green credentials before it ever became fashionable and developed a growing concern for the environment and shortly after that, moved to Seattle to study forestry, though he never finished the course.īack in California, he married Una Kuster whom he had met whilst at University and they settled in Carmel. After graduating from the Occidental College, Jeffers moved onto university in South California where he began studying literature and then moved onto medicine.

Jeffers was always academically gifted and his mother and father always supported his forays into poetry.įrom a young age he was interested in the classics of Greece and Rome and studied both the languages and the literary greats of that time. His father was a minister and his brother later went on to become a respected astronomer. Born in Pennsylvania at the end of the 19th Century, John Robinson Jeffers was a narrative and epic poet who believed you needed to dehumanize in order to explore the bigger picture.

Tor house robinson jeffers poem