‘Signpost‘ by Robinson Jeffers is a poem worth a look. Jeffers lived on the Californian coast south of San Francisco and wrote vitriolic verse in the 1920s to 194os. This is a picture of Tor House, the house he built in Carmel, a town I went through last Monday.
Jeffers attracts me for his sense of the greater glory of nature as something which gives needed magnitude and dignity to human experience. However most of the poems in the three very weighty volumes of The Collected Poetry of… (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989) betray or outright exhibit, an anger at all human society which becomes tiring and a cynicism for the human future which is somewhat depressing. For this reason I don’t return to his work with much enthusiasm – apart from his canonical poem ‘Hurt Hawks’, the poem most people vaguely familiar with his work know. Thought I’d share the photo of Tor House though.