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Robert Zaller publishes highly lauded critical study of Jeffers

On 25 January 2012 Stanford University will publish Robert Zaller’s highly lauded critical study Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime. Professor Zaller’s earlier work on Jeffers includes The Cliffs of Solitude (1983) and Centennial Essays for Robinson Jeffers (1991).

According to the Stanford University Press website: Robinson Jeffers and the American Sublime is the most comprehensive and most substantial critical work ever devoted to the major American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962). Jeffers, the best known poet of California and the American West, particularly valorized the Big Sur region, making it his own as Frost did New England and Faulkner, Mississippi, and connecting it to the wider tradition of the American sublime in Emerson, Thoreau, and John Muir. The book also links Jeffers to a Puritan sublime in early American verse and explores his response to the Darwinian and Freudian revolutions and his engagement with modern astronomy. This discussion leads to a broad consideration of Jeffers’ focus on the figure of Christ as emblematic of the human aspiration toward God—a God whom Jeffers defines not in Christian terms but in those of an older materialist pantheism and of modern science. The later sections of the book develop a conspectus of the democratic sublime that addresses American exceptionalism through the prism of Jeffers’ Jeffersonian ethos. A final chapter places Jeffers’ poetic thought in the larger cosmological perspective he sought in his late works.

“Robert Zaller’s book sets out to be the fullest and most detailed explication of Jeffers’ large body of poetry and his literary career, and it delivers on that ambition. It is the best single critical book about Jeffers and sets a benchmark that will be difficult to meet, let alone surpass.”—Albert Gelpi, Emeritus, Stanford University

Robinson Jeffers and the American sublime will be available from Stanford UP or Amazon.com on 25 January 2012.

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