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A Major Publication in Jeffers Scholarship Appears

The second volume of The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers with the Selected Letters of Una Jeffers, Volume 2, edited by James Karman, was published by Stanford University Press in late September. At 1,102 pages, it is even longer than Volume 1 (997 pages). This new volume covers the years of a single decade, 1931 – 1939, during which Jeffers attained his greatest fame in the earlier years, which was followed by exhaustion and creative and marital crises later in the decade. Readers will find a vast store of information on Jeffers’s circle of friends and acquaintances, the development of the friendship with Mabel Dodger Luhan, the crisis in Taos of 1938 (including missing letters that shed considerable light on the affair), family interactions, Jeffers’s reluctant attempts to explain himself to his audience, and much, much more. As valuable as the texts of the letters themselves are the copious and carefully researched annotations by Jim and Paula Karman, which make the volume, like its predecessor, a kind of social history of the decade, through the Jefferses’ eyes. It may be ordered from Stanford University press at: http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=21350

RJA member John Cusatis publishes new work

RJA member John Cusatis’s article “The Curious Desire of Knowing: Robinson Jeffers and the Poetry of Science,” was published this summer as part of the two volume anthology Restoring the Mystery of the Rainbow: Literature’s Refraction of Science (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi Press, 2011). The article, which draws its title from Jeffers’s poem “De Rerum Virtute,” examines the role science played in increasing Jeffers’s reverence for the natural world. The essay was originally presented as a paper at the RJA Conference in Carmel in 2004.

Cusatis also recently edited a reference book titled Postwar Literature, 1945-1970 (New York: Facts on File, 2010), which includes an essay titled “Modern Primitive Poets” by University of South Carolina professor Keen Butterworth. The essay treats Jeffers alongside other “modern primitives”: James Dickey, Theodore Roethke, Robert Penn Warren, and William Carlos Williams. In the volume’s introduction, Cusatis frequently references the vigilant nature of Jeffers’ poetry, particularly the poem “Carmel Point,” which captures Jeffers’s disgust with the increasing encroachment of postwar suburban development. Library Journal named the book a 2011 “Best Reference Source.”