1950
Arms, George, and Joseph Kunitz. Poetry Explication. New York: Swallow, 1950. 93. Revised by Joseph Kunitz, 1962. 153–54. [Checklist of major explications of RJ’s poems.]
Breen, Robert. “Symbolic Action in the Oral Interpretation of Robinson Jeffers’s ‘Roan Stallion.’” Northwestern University dissertation, 1950. [Abstract in RJN 24 (Sept. 1969): 6. Interrelation and effect of tonal patterns, sound repetitions (alliteration, assonance, consonance), sound patterns (cognates, acrostic scrambling, chiasmus, augmentation, and diminution), and oral patterns according to behavior (adaptive, emotional, emphatic, and conversational).]
Commager, Henry S. “Cult of the Irrational.” The American Mind. New Haven: Yale UP, 1950. 128–32. B42. [Puts RJ in tradition of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Arnold; but RJ ends in nihilism.]
Deutsch, Babette. “Poetry at Mid-Century.” Virginia Quarterly Review 26 (Winter 1950): 67–75. [Whitman’s free strophes and high reaches find echoes in RJ’s savage witness to cosmic consciousness.]
Gilder, R. “Medea.” Theatre Arts Anthology. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1950. 669– 72. [Reprinted from “Actors All.” Theatre Arts Magazine 31 (Dec. 1947): 10–12. RJ has created a terrifying image of evil, “a powerful rendering of this song of hate.”]
Glicksberg, Charles I. “Modern Literature and the Sense of Doom.” Arizona Quarterly 6 (Autumn 1950): 208–17. [RJ gave the lost generation premonitions of disaster; his misanthropic denunciation was the frustrated passion of inverted love; RJ is the Cassandra of his generation.]
Jeffers, Robinson. “‘The Tower Beyond Tragedy’: Poet and Playwright Tells How He Wrote Drama Based on Greek Stories.” New York Times 26 Nov. 1950: sec. 11: 1. [Greeks were less cramped by convention of understatement and were uninhibited in action; they represented human nature stripped of the inessential; RJ chose Agamemnon because of Orestes’s potential for pantheistic mysticism; projected incest as symbol of human self-obsession; discusses changes from 1925 text: erasing Cassandra’s laments, adding Electra’s collapse.]
Matthiesssen, F. O., ed. Introduction. The Oxford Book of American Verse. New York: Oxford UP, 1950. [Contrasts RJ and Eliot as far apart but agreeing on modern decay, p. xxv.]
Powell, Lawrence Clark. “Robinson Jeffers.” Montevallo Review 1 (Summer 1950): 46– 52. [Discusses “Cawdor,” “Thurso’s Landing,” and “Give Your Heart to the Hawks.”]
Southworth, James. “Robinson Jeffers.” Some Modern Poets. New York: Macmillan, 1950. 107–21. [Emphasis on violence, over-simple characters, prosy style; narratives catch attention but empty.]
Swift, Arlene. “Robinson Jeffers: ‘The Tower Beyond Tragedy’: A Critical Study of the Philosophy of Robinson Jeffers and his Validity as a Modern Tragedian.” Columbia University thesis, 1950. [Abstract in RJN 25 (Feb. 1970): 7.]
Waggoner, Hyatt H. “Robinson Jeffers: Here is Reality.” Heel of Elohim: Science and Values in Modern Poetry. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1950. 105–32. B152. [Discusses “Margrave”; thinks RJ sold out to Darwinian world of science.]
Walker, Robert H. “The Lyric Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.” Columbia University thesis, 1950. [Abstract in RJN 25 (Feb. 1970): 7.]
Wecter, Dixon. “Literary Lodestone: 100 Years of California Writing.” Saturday Review 33 (16 Sept. 1950): 9+. [Flowering of California in RJ, Steinbeck, and Saroyan.]
1951
Bogan, Louise. Achievement in American Poetry, 1900–1950. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1951. 77. [Isolated RJ constructed a peculiar misanthropic world in narratives set against a wild landscape.]
Fitts, Dudley. “The Hellenism of Robinson Jeffers.” The Kenyon Critics. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1951. 307–12. [Reprint from Kenyon Review 8 (Autumn 1946): 678–85. Review of Medea: Jason-Medea myth suited to RJ; he substitutes violence for incest; RJ lacks dramatic force, insight, and control; his characters are speaking puppets; he cannot sympathize.]
Hart, William D. “Robinson Jeffers: A Study of ‘The Tower Beyond Tragedy.’” Columbia University thesis, 1951. [Abstract in RJN 25 (Feb. 1970): 7.]
Jeffers, Robinson. “Statement on Humanism.” The Humanist 11 (Oct. 1951): 200–01. [Prefers “human naturalism” to “naturalistic humanism”; man infinitesimal and momentary; divine nature of things is an object more rewarding, ennobling, and strengthening.]
Lipson, Benjamin H. “Robinson Jeffers and the Paradox of Humanism.” Columbia University thesis, 1951. [Abstract in RJN 25 (Feb. 1970): 7.]
Miles, Josephine. “The Primary Language of Poetry in the 1940s.” The Continuity of Poetic Language. Berkeley: U of California P, 1951. 383–458. [Studies RJ’s words; more story-telling than any other poet of the decade.]
Moss, Sidney P. “Robinson Jeffers as a Narrative Poet.” University of Illinois thesis, 1951. [Abstract in RJN 25 (Feb. 1970): 7.]
Nathan, George Jean. “The Tower Beyond Tragedy.” Theatre Book of the Year: 1950–51. New York: Knopf, 1951. 136–38.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. Robinson Jeffers: A Lecture to Professor James L. Wortham’s Class in Narrative Poetry Given on May 22, 1949. Los Angeles: P of Los Angeles City College, 1951.
Staumann, Heinrich. American Literature in the Twentieth Century. London: Hutchinson House, 1951. 144–47. [RJ’s radical concept of human nature; characters cruel, perverted; the world beautiful.]
Whicher, George F. “The Twentieth Century.” The Literature of the American People. Ed. Arthur Quinn. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951. 878–79. B120. [A tonic misanthropy like Swift’s; master of contemporary baroque writing.]
1952
Blackmur, R. P. “Lord Tennyson’s Scissors: 1912–1950.” Kenyon Review 14 (Winter 1952): 1– 20. [Faulty relation of language to sensibility, meter to rhythm; RJ’s flannel-mouthed inflation.]
Clapp, Frederick Mortimer. Foreword. Hungerfield. By Robinson Jeffers. San Francisco: Grabhorn P, 1952. vi.
Deutsch, Babette. “A Look at the Worst.” Poetry in Our Time. New York: Henry Holt, 1952. 1–27. B48. [Compares RJ with Hardy; RJ grandiloquent, grandiose, ideas strut pompously on the stage yet serene in his tragic awareness of the human condition and of the cosmic grandeur.]
Jeffers, Robinson. “Point Lobos.” Glory of Our West. New York: Doubleday, 1952. [Prose paragraph describes sea lions, cypresses, cliffs, wrecks, former owners, whaling, and cannery.]
Schallert, Edwin. “Anderson Reading Effective.” Los Angeles Times 2 June 1952: sec. 3: 9. [Ojai Festival readings of “The Tower Beyond Tragedy” and “The Cretan Woman.”]
Scherman, David. “Robinson Jeffers.” Literary America: A Chronicle of American Writers. New York: Dodd & Mead, 1952. 132. [Places RJ in broad context; limited discussion.]
Squires, James Radcliffe. “Robinson Jeffers and the Doctrine of Inhumanism.” Harvard University dissertation, 1952. [Abstract in RJN 24 (Sept. 1969): 8. Influence of WWI, Nietzsche’s Revaluation of Values, Schopenhauer’s life-sense as pain, Spengler’s in-evitable culture patterns, Freud’s psychological determinism, Calvinism’s sense of guilt and punishment, Scientific Materialism’s diminishing mankind, and Lucretius; yet RJ as disguised humanist preaching reason and a mitigated, personal freedom.]
Wilder, Amos N. Modern Poetry and the Christian Tradition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952. 63, 110, 183, 184, 244. [Traces Christian influences; Protestant heritage hangs on him as it does on Dreiser, Gide, and Pound.]
Wilson, Edmund. The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1952. 678, 685–86. [RJ’s poetry is prose-like.]
1953
Brooks, Van Wyck. The Writer in America. New York: Dutton, 1953. 40, 117. [With Millay and O’Neill, RJ is example of fickleness of the literary world.]
Feidelson, Charles, Jr. Symbolism and American Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1953. [RJ cited passim.]
Hartshorne, Charles, and William Reese. “Tragic Pantheism.” Philosophers Speak of God. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1953. 69, 208–10.
Highet, Gilbert. “An American Poet.” People, Places and Books. New York: Oxford UP, 1953. 129–34. B74 . [Reprinted in Highet, Powers of Poetry, 1960. Sums up RJ’s themes; he may prove to be one of the great poets of American life.]
Matthiessen, F. O. “Poetry.” Literary History of the United States. Ed. Robert E. Spiller. New York: Macmillan, 1953. 1347–48. B139.
May, Rollo. Man’s Search for Himself. New York: Norton, 1953. 126–29. [“The Tower Beyond Tragedy” reflects the son’s dependency on the mother.]
Stephens, George. “The Narrative and Dramatic Poetry of Robinson Jeffers: A Critical Study.” University of Southern California dissertation, 1953. [Abstract in RJN 24 (Sept. 1969): 8. RJ’s disillusioned idealism and scientific determinism (Freud, Jung, English Romantics,Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Spengler); his mystique of pain; themes: rejection of religion and civilization, stoicism, organic concept of setting; his rich imagination and intensity.]
1954
Atkinson, Brooks. “Cretan Woman.” New York Times 21 May 1954: sec. 2: 1. [Relentless grandeur; natural imagery ideal for Greek theme; should be more appreciated.]
____. “Jeffers Tragedy.” New York Times 21 May 1954: 17. [Craggy verse, flint-like phrases; has never been guilty of feeling hopeful about life; writes with defiant independence and candor.]
Fitts, Dudley. “Gigantic Bad Dreams.” New York Times Book Review 10 Jan. 1954: 18. [In Hungerfield, little success in long poems; animal and nature poems a relief; much preaching; some simple hatred but real poetry.]
Folk, Barbara Nauer. “Robinson Jeffers Taken to Task.” Catholic World 179 (July 1954): 270–73. [RJ is a lamentable failure because his poetry is made subservient to pantheistic notions.]
Gibbs, Alonzo. “Darkish Tower and Double-Reed.” Voices 155 (Sept.–Dec. 1954): 54–56. [RJ’s prophecies show current relevance; dark forebodings less shocking than twenty years ago; RJ hasn’t mellowed, his readers have grown up.]
Gregory, Horace. “The Disillusioned Wordsworth of Our Age.” New York Herald Tribune Book Reviews 24 Jan. 1954: 5. B68. [Review of Hungerfield. New maturity in RJ; not resignation but serenity; a road beyond middle age few American poets have attempted.]
Hayes, Richard. “The Cretan Woman.” Commonweal 60 (10 Sept. 1954): 558. [Hard clear thrust, strewn with passionate boulders of his world-before-time.]
Hedley, Leslie Woolf. Review of Hungerfield. Inferno 10 (1954): 35. [Few critics capable of understanding him; Hungerfield is a chapter in the one great book he has been writing of his life; the repeats bear repetion; “De Rerum Virtute,” “Carmel Point” impressive.]
Heiney, Donald. Essentials of Contemporary Literature. Great Neck, NY: Barron’s Educational Series, 1954. 193–96. [Verse epics; RJ uses Freud and Jung; long poems dark; adapts Greeks.]
Hogan, Beecher. “The Robinson Jeffers Manuscripts at Yale.” Yale University Library Gazette 29 (Oct. 1954): 81–84.
Jeffers, Robinson. “The Cretan Woman.” New York Herald Tribune 4 July 1954: sec. 4: 2. [See Bennett, Stone Mason, 228. A promise (to Agnes Moorehead) at cocktail party; RJ’s pleurisy intervening, she lost interest; the play stored in drawer until Hungerfield.]
____. “Poetry and Survival.” Perspectives USA. Number 9. N.p.: International Publications, 1954. 102–07. [Text of “Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years,” New York Times 18 Feb. 1948: sec. 5: 16+. Reprinted as Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie, 1949. Qualities of ideal poet and his strategies.]
Jeffers, Una. Visits to Ireland: Travel Diaries of Una Jeffers. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie, 1954. [RJ makes selection of five percent of materials and writes foreword after his wife’s death in 1950; family excerpts; he recalls their Faust class, Washington marriage, life at Carmel.]
Jordan-Smith, Paul. “Jeffers’ Poems Show Balance.” Los Angeles Times 17 Jan. 1954: sec. 4: 6. [“From the new volume we know a poet who suffers and shares the tragedy of every man.”]
Leary, Lewis. Articles on American Literature: 1900–1950. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1954.
McCormick, John. “Poet and Anti-Poet.” Western Review 19 (Autumn 1954): 65–72. [Little change since Tamar; despite inverted sentimentality, not a trivial poet; “the appalling sincerity of his coldness and hatred do much . . . to compensate for the absurd-ities.”]
McDonald, G. D. Review of Hungerfield. Library Journal 79 (15 Mar. 1954): 79. [Grandeur in his vision of sea, cliffs, and hawks; holds man as spoiler and viper; almost total misanthropy; but “gives his people enough stature and dignity to attain tragedy.”]
Nemerov, Howard. “Contemporary Poets.” Atlantic 194 (Sept. 1954): 66–68. [“Hungerfield” lacks motivation; “The Cretan Woman” moving and skillfully told.]
Poore, Charles. “Books of The Times.” New York Times Books 23 Jan. 1954: 11. [Hungerfield elegaic; RJ “at his best, a volume of furious threnodies.”]
Powell, Lawrence Clark. Alchemy of Books. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie, 1954. 175–96. B118.
Rodman, Selden. “Knife in the Flowers.” Poetry 84 (July 1954): 226–31. B125. [Characters mere puppets, vessels of generalized passions, one-dimensional; yet best story-teller of poets writing in English.]
Tate, Allen. Sixty American Poets, 1896–1944. Washington: Library of Congress, 1954.
Untermeyer, Louis. “Grim and Bitter Dose.” Saturday Review 37 (26 Jan. 1954): 17. [“Biting language and the ability to communicate the phantasmagoria of terror.”]
____. “Poets Without Readers.” Americas 6 (Sept. 1954): 4.
1955
Bird, Remsen Dubois. “From Neighbor and Friend.” Focus [Occidental College] 1.1 (3 May 1955): 4. [Biographical notes from both a neighbor and a president of Occidental College.]
Bogan, Louise. “Landscape With Jeffers” and “Modern Syndrome.” Selected Criticism: Poetry and Prose. New York: Noonday Press, 1955. 67–69, 302–04. B19.
Bowden, Harry. Robinson Jeffers. San Francisco: Bern Porter, 1955. [Six-page pamphlet.]
Bracher, Frederick. “California’s Literary Regionalism.” American Quarterly 7 (Fall 1955): 275–84.
Carpenter, Frederic I. “Death Comes for Robinson Jeffers” [1940 article]. American Literature and the Dream. New York: Philosophical Library, 1955. 144–54. B37. [RJ’s reversal of values: death may seem the greatest good and life can be evil.]
Gay, Alice. Robinson Jeffers at Occidental College: A Check List of the Jeffers Collection. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie, 1955.
Gregory, Horace. “Poet Without Critics: A Note on Robinson Jeffers.” New World Writing. New York: New World Writing, 1955. 40–52. B68. [“Tamar” one of the major accomplishments in twentieth-century poetry; aristocratic attitude not unlike that of Faulkner and Yeats has reestablished the position of poet as one of singular dignity and courage; awaits the verdict of posterity.]
Jeffers, Robinson. “With All Good Wishes.” Focus [Occidental College] 1.1 (3 May 1955): 5. [Recalls writing for Aurora; an artist needs readership, recording, and learning professional disciplines.]
____. Remarks to Benjamin Miller regarding consciousness. [Ms. at Occidental College, text in Selected Letters 236n. Consciousness permeates all creation; all life aware inward and outward; even in mineral world.]
McTaggart, Arthur. “The Function of Greek Myth in the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.” Phoenix [Seoul, Korea] 1 (Summer 1955): 1–5. [RJ returns pre-classical Greek myths to their old wonted pitilessness.]
Moisling, Patricia. “Jeffers, the Poet.” Focus [Occidental College] 1.1 (3 May 1955). 17– 32.
Ohlson, Tom. “Jeffers, the Man.” Focus [Occidental College] 1.1 (3 May 1955). 14–16.
“Poetry Society of America Award to Robinson Jeffers.” New York Times 21 Jan. 1955: 17. [$1,250 Borestone Mt. Award for Hungerfield; had declined the award in 1954.]
Quinn, Sister M. B. The Metamorphic Tradition in Modern Poetry. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1955. [RJ passim.]
Robinson Jeffers at Occidental College. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie, 1955. [Pamphlet mostly introducing the collection.]
“Robinson Jeffers Number.” Focus [Occidental College] (3 May 1955).
Sievers, W. David. Freud on Broadway. New York: Hermitage House, 1955. 123–24. [“The Tower Beyond Tragedy” has musical language, but proves lifeless and dull.]
Smith, Cecil. “Jeffers’ Poetry Gives Stage a New Language.” Los Angeles Times 9 Jan. 1955: sec. 4: 4. [Review of The Cretan Woman.]
Spiller, Robert E. The Cycle of American Literature. New York: Macmillan, 1955. 234. [RJ noted as part of a powerful Naturalistic movement.]
1956
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Meridian, 1956. 26, 235. [Brief but significant citations; quotes from “Roan Stallion” and the eagle archetype in “Cawdor.”]
Fitts, Dudley. “The Poet Appraised.” New York Times Book Review 9 Dec. 1956: 12. [Narratives are “Cambyses-ridden”; declamations of “textbook sin.”]
Hughes, Langston. I Wonder as I Wander: Autobiography. New York: Hill & Wang, 1956. 282–85. B77. [See excerpt in RJN 55: 28. Contrasts Una Jeffers with RJ in Carmel setting.]
Jeffers, Robinson. Foreword. Directions in the Sun. By Eric Barker. New York: Gotham Book Mart, 1956. [viii–ix.] [Glad another poet celebrates same hills and canyons; landscape characterized by lonely resistance and break-neck violence, eternally resists vulgarization; Barker a skillful modern.]
____. Foreword. The Loving Shepherdess. New York: Random House, 1956. [i–ii.] [Special edition designed by Merle Armitage and Ward Ritchie; etchings by Jean Kellogg. Origin in footnote in Walter Scott novel; suggested vulnerability in nakedness of human life; describes Coast Range as hundred-mile sea-wall of mountains as backdrop; lauds Jean Kellogg.]
____. Themes in My Poems. San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1956. [Describes themes, then illustrates with readings: Death in “Thurso’s Landing,” “Bed by the Window,” and “Descent to the Dead”; War in “Rearmament,” “The Bloody Sire,” and “Watch the Lights Fade”; Culture Cycles in “The Broken Balance”; Pantheistic Mysticism in “The Tower Beyond Tragedy”; Beauty in “The Excesses of God”; the Self-Torturing God in the Hanged God of “At the Birth of an Age”; Landscape in “The Place for No Story”; Hawks in “Birds” and “Rock and Hawk”; and Poetry as Discovery. RJ introduced Library of Congress lecture with “The Poet in Democracy” (Stone Mason of Tor House, 175–77; Bennett unaccountably drops the theme of Death).]
Lehman, B. H. Preface. Themes in My Poems. By Robinson Jeffers. San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1956. v–ix.
Powell, Lawrence Clark. “The Double Marriage of Robinson Jeffers.” Southwestern Review 41 (Summer 1956): 278–82. B118–19 [Reprinted in Powell, Books, West Southwest, 1957, 110–20. Marriage to Una and to the Carmel-Big Sur landscape; both matured and deepened his art.]
Squires, James Radcliffe. The Loyalties of Robinson Jeffers. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1956. B139–40. [Philosophy like that of Schopenhauer and Spengler; psychology like that of Jung; literary art like that of Lawrence, Whitman, and Lucretius.]
1957
Anzilotti, Rolando. “Robinson Jeffers, Tragico Solitario.” Tre Saggi Americani. Pistolia: Tipographfia Pistolese, 1957. 71–97. [Biography, career, and reputation; translations into Italian.]
Badosa, Enrique. “Robinson Jeffers.” Atlantico [Madrid] 8 (1957): 75–84.
Busch, Niven. “Duel on a Headland.” New Directions: The Student in a Changing World. Ed. W. Bower. New York: Lippincott, 1957. 443–48. [Reprinted from Saturday Review 11 (9 March 1935): 553.]
Bush, Douglas. “American Poets.” Mythology and Romantic Tradition in English Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1957. 481–525.
Carpenter, Frederic I. Review of Squires, The Loyalties of Robinson Jeffers. American Literature 29 (May 1957): 225–26.
Carroll, Paul. “Prophet Without Honor.” Poetry 90 (July 1957): 254–56. [Review of Squires, The Loyalties of Robinson Jeffers. RJ has written too much too poorly; unfavorably compared to Yeats and Eliot.]
Eiseley, Loren C. “The Bird and the Machine.” The Immense Journey. New York: Random House, 1957. 179–93. B53. [Thoughts paralleling those of RJ; a prose counterpart of “Hurt Hawks.”]
Exner, Richard. “Der Dichter Robinson Jeffers.” Neue Deutsche Hefte 26 (July 1957): 345–47.
Frohock, Wilbur. The Novel of Violence in America. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1957. 6. [RJ’s narratives exemplify only bloody violence.]
Kiley, George. “Robinson Jeffers: The Short Poems.” University of Pittsburgh dissertation, 1957. B90. [Abstract in RJN 24 (Sept. 1969): 6. Tension between belief in beauty of universe vs. contempt for mankind; RJ’s methods of apologue, short narration, coastal views, rhetorical comment, soliloquies; RJ’s diction, prosody, paradoxes, ambiguities, ironies, apodictic statements; his conflicts; explication of “Night.”]
Miller, James E. Review of Squires, The Loyalties of Robinson Jeffers. Prairie Schooner 31 (Spring 1957): 3–5. [Agrees with Squires that New Criticism did RJ less than justice; finds full gulps of RJ chilling.]
Rexroth, Kenneth. “In Defense of Jeffers.” Saturday Review of Literature 40 (10 Aug. 1957): 30. [Scathing Yvor Winters-like attack: verse shoddy, pretentious, posturing, much vulgarity, melodrama, his philosophy a mass of contradictions; childish laboring of pathetic fallacy.]
Ridgeway, Ann M. “A Study in Inhumanism: Action Symbols in Shorter Poems of Robinson Jeffers.” Bowling Green State University thesis, 1957. [Abstract in RJN 25 (Feb. 1970): 7–8.]
Sullivan, A. M. Review of Squires, The Loyalties of Robinson Jeffers. Catholic World 184 (Mar. 1957): 478–79. [RJ has stature and power, yet sick beauty and a sodden air; an obsession with sadism and incest.]
1958
Benamau, Michel. Review of Squires, The Loyalties of Robinson Jeffers. Etudes Anglaises 11 (Apr.–June 1958): 185–86. [Squires’s study lucid; RJ has maturity and dignity of message.]
Clurman, Harold. “Judith Anderson.” Lies Like Truth: Theater Reviews and Essays. New York: Macmillan, 1958. 88–90. B40. [In Medea Judith Anderson works too hard, her approach is chiefly physical, doesn’t convey Medea as person or concept; RJ pins his purposely unrealistic characters in timelessness, attempting a literature of permanence, but then punishes them.]
Drew, Fraser. “The Gentleness of Robinson Jeffers.” Western Humanities Review 12 (Autumn 1958): 379–81. B51. [Offers “The Loving Shepherdess” and “For Una” as examples.]
Frost, Robert. “A Poet Speaks of Poets.” Los Angeles Times 22 May 1958: sec. 3: 5. [“I am an admirer of Robinson Jeffers. He has kept California as a base.”]
Fuller, Dorothy. Review of Squires, The Loyalties of Robinson Jeffers. Arizona Quarterly 14 (Spring 1958): 70–71. [Short poems present Inhumanist position better than long narratives which exaggerate.]
Heiney, Donald. Recent American Literature. Great Neck, NY: Barron’s Educational Series, 1958. 311–17. [RJ revives verse narrative; tone like that of von Hofmannsthal; philosophy like that of Lawrence.]
Magill, Frank. “Robinson Jeffers.” Masterplots Cyclopedia of World Authors. New York: Salem P, 1958. 565–66. [Biographical: deserves prominence; our atomic horrors may prove him a major prophet.]
Monjian, Mercedes Cunningham. Robinson Jeffers, A Study in Inhumanism. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1958. [Inhumanism distinguished from inhumanity; mankind subdued in terms of something greater; the natural world given centrality.]
____. “Robinson Jeffers: A Study in Inhumanism.” University of Pittsburgh thesis, 1958. [Abstract in RJN (Feb. 1970): 8. Master’s thesis published as book in same year.]
“People.” Time 72 (20 Oct. 1958): 41. [Academy of American Poetry Award of $5,000.]
Wilder, Amos. “The Cross: Social Trauma or Redemption.” Theology and Modern Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958. 95–110. [Examination of “Dear Judas”; RJ offers a choice between faith and simple negation.]
1959
Cargill, Oscar. Intellectual America: Ideas on the March. New York: Macmillan, 1959. 741–51. [A mirror and mouthpiece of the moral confusion of his time; in him man’s fate has majesty.]
Drew, Fraser. “Librarian and Teacher—Allies for Poetry.” Library Journal 84 (15 May 1959): 156–62. [Describes Drew’s exhibit of RJ, Eliot, and H. Crane at the University of Buffalo Library.]
____. “The Loving Shepherdess of Jeffers and Scott.” Trace 31 (Apr.–May 1959): 13–16. B51. [How he found Clare in The Heart of Midlothian, and how he changed her for a tender tragedy.]
Ferguson, Joe. Review of Squires, The Loyalties of Robinson Jeffers. New Mexico Quarterly 29 (Spring 1959): 125–27. [RJ’s reputation’s decline due to the age’s self-consciousness, not his fault.]
Foster, George. “Literature in the Twenties.” Shenandoah 10 (Spring 1959): 11–14. [Lewis, Mencken, Dreiser, and RJ derided the religious element in democracy.]
Jones, Howard Mumford. Guide to American Literature and Its Backgrounds Since 1890. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1959. 169.
Keller, Karl A. “Robinson Jeffers and ‘The Beauty of Things’: A Concept of Nature.” University of Utah thesis, 1959. [Abstract in RJN 25 (Feb. 1970): 8.]
Kunitz, Stanley. “American Poetry’s Silver Age.” Harper’s Magazine 219 (Oct. 1959): 173–79.
Lilienthal, Theodore. Exhibition of Books and Manuscripts by Robinson Jeffers. Los Angeles: Book Club of California, 1959.
Moss, Sidney P. “Robinson Jeffers: A Defense.” The American Book Collector 10 (Sept. 1959): 9–14. [Recommends Be Angry at the Sun to RJ’s detractors as strange sanity and bitter truth.]
“Rugged, Romantic World Apart.” Life 47 (6 July 1959): 56–63.
Seidlin, Oskar. “The Oresteia Today: A Myth Dehumanized.” Thought 34 (Autumn 1959): 434–52. B134. [Compares the Oresteia of Goethe, Haupmann, Sartre, and RJ; rejects RJ’s mysticism in Orestes of “The Tower Beyond Tragedy” as dehumanized; Cassandra: a frightening exponent of deranged nihilism.]
Waggoner, Hyatt H. Review of Monjian. American Literature 31 (Mar. 1959): 99. [Some admiration for Monjian’s assessment of RJ’s criticism and scholarship.]
Woodbridge, J. C. “A Bibliographical Note on Jeffers.” American Book Collector 10 (Sept. 1959): 15–18. [A thorough checklist of major post-Alberts criticism.]