The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers: Volume One, 1890-1930 (review)

Ann Ridgeway's The Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, published in 1968 by the Johns Hopkins University Press and long out of print, has played an important role in Jeffers scholarship. Because Jeffers published few critical pieces (unlike his contemporaries Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot), his letters are a crucial source for understanding his relationships to his contemporaries and his sense of the world around him. The letters are also one of the few sources we have delineating his ideas on literary craft and how he understood his relationship to the literary tradition, and they help document the chronology of his poems and thus, as well, his development as a writer. Scholars of Jeffers have mined and re-mined the letters found in Ridgeway's collection. James Karman's comprehensive and meticulously annotated edition of Jeffers's correspondence is rich with new ore that will clarify, complicate, and broaden our understanding of his poetry and will help us more fully grasp his participation in the literary culture of his period, especially the literary culture of the West.

The now-published first volume (of a projected three-volume set) of the letters covers 1890-1930 and takes us up through the initial years of Jeffers's major work, most notably the publication of Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems (1925) and The Women at Point Sur (1927). By the time the set is completed, it will increase by six-fold the letters previously available through Ridgeway. That alone would make this new edition important. But three other factors add to its value. First is the breadth and depth of the annotations, which make reading Karman's presentation of the letters, both those we have had and those he has newly gathered, a dialogue not only with Jeffers but also with an array of significant figures. The weave of connections deftly mapped in the annotations shows us the workings of a variety of literary communities, especially western literary communities. Second is the edition's introduction, "The Life and Works of Robinson Jeffers," a concise, insightful biography that brings the arc of Jeffers's life, career, and relationship to his era into focus. Third is the inclusion of the "selected" correspondence of Una Jeffers, the poet's wife and muse, who often handled his literary correspondence. Her letters help bring her role in Jeffers's career more clearly into focus and further document the literary, social, and familial contexts for his work. It should also be noted that throughout this first volume of The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, Karman's scholarly care and thoroughness are repeatedly evident, and so is his tact. He neither stints on the annotations nor swamps the letters with his research; the result is an edition that can be used by scholars and also read by more general readers interested in Jeffers and the literature of the West.

Clearly, this edition is a scholarly landmark for anyone working with Jeffers. It is also a major resource for those studying the literary culture of the American West in the first half of the twentieth century. This volume underscores the story of American poetry in this period as more than the story of those ensconced in the high modernist canon.