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This review is taken from PN Review 118, Volume 24 Number 2, November - December 1997.

Rodney AitchteySTRESS AND STRAIN Robinson Jeffers and a Galaxy of Writers, edited by William B. Thesing (University of South Carolina Press) $29.95
Robinson Jeffers: Dimensions of a Poet , edited by Robert Brophy (Fordham University Press) $30 and $17.95

Robinson Jeffers' prescription for transhuman values found little sympathy in his lifetime, and less following his death in 1962. The morning after the night he died, people woke to find a very, very rare phenomenon: the ground was covered by snow.

Virginia and Leonard Woolf were publishing Robinson Jeffers at their Hogarth Press between 1928 and 1930. (Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, Cawdor, and Dear Judas and Other Poems.) And in 1948, the Edinburgh Festival opened with Jeffers' adaptation of Euripides' Medea. When next we hear of him, nearly forty years have passed; it is with Carcanet's Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems, The Centenary Edition edited by Colin Falck in 1987.

Jeffers fared no better in the USA, literally disappearing from critical and academic notice. But it is claimed by the publishers of the Galaxy volume that the relatively recently published three of four volumes of Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, edited by Tim Hunt, have 'recaptured the attention of American readers'. And indeed it was the 'renewed enthusiasm' which inspired William B. Thesing to assemble this critical volume, advised by Time Hunt, to honour 'one of the twentieth century's foremost Jeffers scholars, William H. Nolte' (whose Rock and Hawk: Robinson Jeffers and the Romantic Agony was published in 1978.)

Among the contents of Galaxy is a recorded panel discussion with Charles Altieri, Terence Diggory, Albert Gelpi, and James E. Miller, Jr., edited by Tim Hunt, 'arranged by the Robinson Jeffers Association for ...


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