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.

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.”

The Second RJA Annual Fund Appeal: Goal $3,000

Like all non-profit organizations, the Robinson Jeffers Association depends on memberships and donations of time, expertise, and money to survive.  Indeed if it were not for the donations of countless hours of administrative work and the financial generosity our board and friends, we could not do what we do.

Our modest goal for this year’s annual fund is $3,000. Click here to join us in strengthening our organization.

Click here to read President David J. Rothman’s annual fund letter for a summary of RJA’s accomplishments this year.

How will this money be spent?  There is far more that we can do to advance our mission and keep our organization strong.  Among other things:

  • We still pay our conference keynote speakers far less than we should, which means we are always asking for favors;
  • In a time of shrinking travel budgets, we have limited funds to help students and junior faculty travel to our events, which means that every year there are some who cannot attend;
  • Our excellent journal, Jeffers Studies, is healthy but could always use greater resources;
  • We cannot advertise our conferences and journal to a larger audience;
  • We cannot pursue special projects and events as much as we would like, such as presentations of musical pieces inspired by Jeffers and productions of his plays;
  • We do not have the funds to accomplish greater outreach for new members;
  • We have now built a strong website, but of course it needs maintenance.

These are just some of the ways in which we would use the funds you give to us, and of course, as we are a 501c3, your gift is fully tax-deductible and our books are transparent.

So, as the year draws to a close and you consider your own charitable balance sheet, we hope that you will keep the RJA in your mind and help us to reach our modest goal for this Annual Fund of $3,000.  Your gift will make a significant difference in our fortunes.  I assure you that the funds will be used to advance programs that put Jeffers’s poetry into the hands of readers and to help us to attract the sustained attention that this great poet deserves now more than ever.

Donation Levels:
Gray Hawk $25
Peregrine  $50
Red-Tailed Hawk $100
Golden Eagle  $250
Bald Eagle $500
Condor $1,000
Other: _______

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