Robinson Jeffers

(1887-1962)

A poetic voice well read in the sciences and centered with laser-like focus on the natural world and humanity’s grave mistakes

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) was a 20th-century American poet whose work profoundly touches on the meaning of human existence. Living and writing from his self-built stone tower in Carmel, California, Jeffers drew inspiration from the rugged beauty of the Big Sur coastline. His poetry frequently emphasizes humanity’s smallness within the grandeur of nature, advancing a strong pantheistic philosophy that rejects making humans the center of the Universe. He understood that Man’s mind may be unique in the world, but realized that man’s mind is a product – not the measure of – the external world and does not elevate him above it. He saw clearly that the pollution of the environment, the destruction of other species, the squandering of natural resources, the recurrent urge to war, and the violence of our cities as the inevitable consequence of humanity being out of harmony with its own world.

Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House and Hawk Tower in Carmel, California

Connection to the Big Sur Coast

Jeffers’ poetry is inseparable from the rugged, untamed beauty of the Big Sur coast. As Loren Eiseley said, “No one reading Jeffers can escape the impress of the untamed Pacific environment upon which he brooded… Something utterly wild had crept into his mind. The sea-beaten coast, the fierce freedom of its hunting hawks, possessed and spoke through him.. It was one of the most uncanny and complete relationships between a man and his natural background that I now in literature.”

Jeffers described the mid-California coastal area of the Big Sur and Monterey Coast, and the wild Santa Lucia mountain range above it, as the chief actor in his poetry, writing “Each of my too many stories has grown up like a plant from some particular canyon or promontory, some particular relationship of rock and water, wood, grass, and mountain”

I, gazing at the boundaries of granite and spray, the
Established sea-marks, felt behind me
Mountain and plain, the immense breadth of the continent
Before me, the mass and doubled stretch of water.

Tor House & Hawk Tower

In 1914, when they first saw the unspoiled beauty of the Carmel-Big Sur coast south of California’s Monterey Peninsula, Robinson Jeffers and his wife, Una knew they had found their “inevitable place.” He called his home Tor House, naming it for the craggy knoll, the “tor” on which it was built. Carmel Point, then, was a treeless headland, almost devoid of buildings.

Tor House, built by hand from granite boulders gathered from the rocky shore of Carmel Bay, overlooks the Pacific Ocean and serves as a testament to Robinson Jeffers’ connection to the land. He also built 40-foot high Hawk Tower, completed in 1925, as a retreat for his wife and a magic place for his sons. The tower is reminiscent of the castle towers in Europe. His verses often evoke the region’s dramatic cliffs, ancient redwoods, and crashing waves.

It was in Tor House that Jeffers wrote all of his major poetical works: the long narratives of “this coast crying out for tragedy,” the shorter meditative lyrics and dramas on classical themes, culminating in 1947 with the critically acclaimed adaptation of Medea for the Broadway stage, with Dame Judith Anderson in the title role.

During their near half-century living at Tor House, Robinson and his wife Una raised their twin sons, Donnan and Garth. Una organized and directed both family life and Jeffers’ literary career; and Jeffers wrote the poems that made him a nationally and internationally known poet whose poems on human life on this planet are especially relevant today.

“This place is the noblest thing I have ever seen. No imaginable / Human presence here could do anything / But dilute the lonely self-watchful passion.”
— Robinson Jeffers, “The Place for No Story”

Thankfully, although now surrounded by neighboring houses instead of the wild treeless windswept land in Jeffers’ own time, Tor House itself remains much the same as it was when Jeffers lived there; it is preserved and open to public access by carefully-limited tours by the non-profit Tor House Foundation. Tor House, Hawk Tower, and the surrounding gardens was designated a National Historic Landmark on December 13, 2024 in recognition of the property’s national significance in the history of the United States.

Jeffers’ Philosophy and Environmental Legacy

Jeffers’ poetry reflects his belief that humanity is not the center of the universe, but rather one small part of a vast, interconnected natural world. His philosophy, often termed “Inhumanism,” challenges anthropocentrism and calls for reverence for the nonhuman world. His plea was that mankind should “uncenter his ind from humanity.”

“The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars, / Life is your child, but there is in me / Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye that watched before there was an ocean.”
— Robinson Jeffers, “Continent’s End”

His philosophy, grounded as it was firmly in the world of Nature, allowed him to contemplate death passionately, to see a soaring hawk as an important messenger, and to recognize that man’s total concern with himself and his technology is not healthy and should be tempered with a little love and respect for wholeness and wildness. His views were formed from his direct experience in nature, along with extensive reading in philosophy, religion, mythology, and science. Crucially, Robinson is widely considered “the only modern poet who has accepted without any qualification the views of life and man explicitly offered or implicitly suggested by the traditional scientific texts.” (Hyatt Howe Waggoner). He avoided the sentimental and idealized view of Nature so common with the Romantic poets, because his world view was enriched by an extensive knowledge of astronomy (his brother was an astronomer), physics, evolutionary biology, and other scientific fields. He breathed the music and mystery back into scientists’ description, dropping the dry rationalism and supposed “objectivity” of science. Jeffers resulting mystic sensibility was thus firmly grounded in the facts of Nature as revealed by science.

He wrote with a vivid sensuous and rhythmic style, creating a sort of tidal sort of recurrence in his lines. He rejected the flowery, abstract metaphoric style of many of his contemporaries. He developed a distinct style of verse based on the number of accented syllables in each line.

Jeffers proclaims in “My Loved Subjects,” a poem published posthumously: Mountain and ocean, rock, water, and beasts and trees /Are the protagonists, the human people are only symbolic interpreters.

John Courtney has explained Jeffers’ importance well: “Robinson Jeffers’ evocations of the divine in nature are so powerfully depicted in his poetry that he has served to revive our modem religious sensibilities. His spiritual insights were in three major areas: First, he has inspired mankind to see the world anew as the ultimate reality. Second, he perceived and described the physical universe itself as immanently divine. And finally, he challenged us to accept the ultimate demands of modem science which assign humanity no real or ultimate importance in the universe while also aspiring us to lives of spiritual celebration attuned to the awe, beauty and wonder about us.

In his own prose, Jeffers disclosed his world view: “I believe that the Universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love and there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one’s affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one’s self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions -the world of spirits.”

This approach counsels people to turn outward toward the natural world for fulfilkment, relieve themselves from self-proccupation, and accept a humbling perspective on human activity.

This perspective, coupled with Jeffers’ vivid descriptions of California’s landscapes, has inspired many ordinary people as well as writers who view his work as a call to protect the natural world. Organizations like the Tor House Foundation, which preserves his home and provides for its visitation, continue to promote his work and its environmental message. The Robinson Jeffers Association continues to support the scholarly discussion, study, and teaching of Robinson Jeffers.

Love That, Not Man Apart

Jeffers’ work is a major influence on modern environmental thinkers. In his “keystone” poem, “the Answer,” Jeffers asserted – rather boldly for the time:

…the greatest beauty is organic wholeness,
the wholeness of life and things,
the divine beauty of the universe.
Love that, not man apart from that…

These lines were the inspiration for the 1965 Sierra Club Exhibit Format book Not Man Apart, whose contributing photographers reads like a who’s who of West Coast photography: Ansel Adams, Philip Hyde, Morley Baer, Wynn Bullock, William Garnett, Eliot Porter, Cole & Edward Weston, Don Worth, Cedric Wright. As made clear in the Preface by David Brower, the Big Sur country was too inhabited to be made into a National Seashore such as those at Point Reyes in California or Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Brower posed the key question, reminiscent perhaps of Aldo Leopold’s search for a Land Ethic, and applicable to all great landscapes which are largely in private hands, asking “If the traditional approach to preservation won’t work for this, one of the great meetings of wild ocean and almost-wild coast, then what can be done to make sure it will remain a great place? We need to fnd out and Not Man Apart may play a role in the search.” Perhaps the book indeed influenced the passage of Proposition 20, the Coastal Initiative of 1972 (of which I worked hard to circulate petitions to get it on the ballot), which led to the legislative approval of the California Coastal Act of 1976. These laws required careful land-use planning along the coastline and provided for public access wherever possible. Moreover, it was books like this one that kept the rugged Big Sur Coast road – today sometimes still impassable due to rockfalls and landslides – into part of the California Freeway System, despoiling all the beauty of this wild meeting of land and sea. Instead, Highway 1 became the protoype for the “scenic highway” system throughout California.

The phrase was also the title for the long-time news publication by Friends of the Earth, founded by David Brower.

His poetry aligns with the principles of deep ecology, which emphasize the intrinsic value of all living beings and the importance of preserving natural systems.

Notable writers and environmentalists, including Edward Abbey, Loren Eiseley, and Gary Snyder, have drawn inspiration from Jeffers’ call to live humbly and in harmony with nature. His enduring relevance underscores the timelessness of his message in an era of ecological crisis.

The rugged coastline of Big Sur, California, a key inspiration for Jeffers’ poetry. Photo by David Iliff. License- CC BY-SA 3.0.H

Robinson Jeffers on the cover of Time, April 4, 1932

Lines from Robinson Jeffers

All our pain comes from restraint of love…
The beetle beside my hand in hte grass
and the little brown bird tilted on a stone…
there was nothing there that i didn’t love with my heart…
(The Loving Shepherdess)

Or as mathematics, a human invention
That parallels but never touches reality, gives the astronomer
Metaphors through which he may comprehend
The powers and the flow of things: so the human sense
Of beauty is our metaphor of their excellence, their divine nature: — like dust in a whirwind,
making
The wind wind visible”
(“De Rerum Virtute” (“On the Nature of Things”)

Consider if you like how the lilies grow,
Make your veins cold, look at the silent stars, let your eyes
Climb the great ladder out of the pit of yourself and man
Things are so beautiful, your love will follow your eyes …
(“Sign-Post” )

“The happiest and freest man is the scientist investigation nature, or the artist admiring it; the person who is interested in things that are not human. Or if he is Interested in human things, let him regard them objectively, as a small part of the great music. Certainly humanity has claims on all of us; we can best fulfill them by keeping our emotional sanity; and this by seeing beyond and around the human race.”

[A] theme that has much engaged my verses is the expression of a religious feeling, that perhaps must be called pantheism, though I hate to type it with a name. It is the feeling…I will say the certainty…that the universe is one being, a single organism, one great life that includes all life and all things; and is so beautiful that it must be loved and reverenced; and in moments of mystical vision we identify ourselves with it.

“To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things – earth, stone and water. Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars. The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions, And unhuman nature its towering reality- For man’s half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock And water and sky are constant – to feel Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural Beauty, is the sole business of poetry. The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas. The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.”
(“The Beauty of Things’)

I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling high up in heaven,
And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit narrowing, I understood then
That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the flight-feathers
Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer.
I could see the naked red head between the great wings
Bear downward staring. I said, “My dear bird, we are wasting time here.
These old bones will still work; they are not for you.”
But how beautiful he looked, gliding down
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering
away in the sea-light over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten
by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes–
What a sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment;
What a life after death.
(“Vulture”)

Connection to the Big Sur Coast

Tor House & Hawk Tower

Jeffers’ Philosophy and Environmental Legacy

Love That, Not Man Apart

Lines from Robinson Jeffers

Further Reading