SOURCE: A review of The Beginning and the End and Other Poems, in Poetry, Vol. 103, No. 5, February, 1964, pp. 316-24.

Dickey was an American poet and critic. In the excerpt below, he suggests that despite Jeffers's conspicuous flaws, he is a poet of greatness and power.

Now that Robinson Jeffers is dead, his last poems have been issued, culled from hand-written manuscripts by his sons and his secretary, Though some of the pieces [in The Beginning and the End and Other Poems] were obviously left unfinished—there are several different ones which have the same passages in them—it is worth noting that they are actually no more or less "finished" than the poems Jeffers published in book after book while he lived. This is typical of Jeffers' approach to poetry, I think; he had, as someone remarked of Charles Ives, "the indifference of greatness." Yet now, in some...