An episode from 9/23/22: What twentieth-century American poet devoted so much time to the environment, and to humanity’s place in it, other than Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)? What other poet devoted his powers not to the puzzles of Modernism but to the plain-spoken strengths of science, prophecy, and myth? Tonight I read ten of Jeffers’ essential poems, and I hope you are as stunned by them as I always am.     

The poems I read are:

• The Excesses of God
• Point Joe
• Hooded Night
• New Mexican Mountain
• Nova
• from Hungerfield
• De Rerum Virtute
• Vulture
• “I am seventy-four years old and suddenly all my strength”
• Inscription for a Gravestone

The episode ends with a 1941 Library of Congress recording of Jeffers reading his poem, “Natural Music.”

Selections of Jeffers’s poetry are legion: many of them ⁠can be found here⁠. The five-volume Collected Poems of Robinson Jeffers, edited by Tim Hunt and published by Stanford University Press, ⁠can be found here⁠. You can read more about his life at the ⁠Poetry Foundation⁠ and ⁠Wikipedia⁠. A larger selection of his poetry, which I recorded in 2020-2021, ⁠can be found here⁠.

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