(John) Robinson Jeffers was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
He was educated at Occidental College. Before turning to writing,
he studied medicine and forestry at the graduate level. In 1914
he moved to Carmel, California, where he lived in relative
isolation -- in a home overlooking the dramatic Pacific coastline
that figures prominently in his work. Jeffers' philosophical stance,
which he dubbed "inhumanism" and defined as "a shifting emphasis and
significance from man to not-man," led many critics to label him a
misanthrope. However, his intent was to challenge humanity's over-
reliance on the flawed social structures of its own making and to
urge its return to a more primal relation with the natural world.
There is a dynamic tension in Jeffers' work between violent energy
and quiet endurance, symbolized as hawk and rock. Often expansive
and rhetorical, his poems employ a line adapted, in part, from
Walt Whitman's lines, and distinguish themselves clearly from the
compact symbolist and spare imagist poems prevalent early in the
century.