SOURCE: "Robinson Jeffers and the Canon," in American Poetry, Vol. 5, No. 1, Fall, 1987, pp. 4-16.

In the following essay, Beers examines the negative reaction to Jeffers's poetry among the New Critics and suggests that feminist and deconstructionist critical approaches may be more receptive to his work.

The poetry of Robinson Jeffers has drawn from critics some of the most vicious—and arguably some of the most entertaining—condemnations afforded to any modern body of literature. At midcentury, R. P. Blackmur attempted to anticipate future critics by predicting which poets of the twentieth century then known to him would enjoy lasting reputations. He finds fault with a wide variety of writers, among them Auden, Empson, and Housman, only to conclude that "all of them are better than the flannel-mouthed inflation in the metric of Robinson Jeffers with his rugged rock-garden violence." Not many years later, Kenneth Rexroth added his voice...