Abstract

The conclusion examines how the Californian poets a generation younger than Jeffers responded to his work and how Kenneth Rexroth's and William Everson's disagreement over the value of his work effectively obscured Jeffers's role as a poetic precursor. It also considers the influence of Jeffers's anti-war poetry on the draft-age poets Everson and Robert Duncan, whose conscientious objection to World War II was in part based on their reading of his work. The conclusion contends that Jeffers's influence has been erased by the lack of consensus among the middle generation poets who follow him, but their extension of his sacramental poetics in the search for the divine in the universe nonetheless confirms his legacy as a central poet in American literary history.

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