Robinson Jeffers Critical Essay | Critical Essay by William H. Nolte

Critical Essay by William H. Nolte

SOURCE: "Robinson Jeffers Redivivus," in Georgia Review, Vol. 32, No. 2, Summer, 1978, pp. 429-34.

In the essay below, Nolte surveys critical reception to Jeffers's work, concluding that after many years of suffering critical disdain, his reputation is once again on the rise.

When Robinson Jeffers died in 1962 his reputation was probably at its lowest ebb in nearly forty years—since, to be precise, the publication (at his own expense) of Tamar and Other Poems (1924), a volume that at first seemed to have been stillborn. Through one of those happy accidents that now and again occur in the literary world the book was brought to the attention of various influential critics—notably, Mark Van Doren, James Rorty, and Babette Deutsch—who praised it so enthusiastically that a new and expanded edition, Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, followed a year later under the imprint of Boni and Liveright, then one of...
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