The love and life of Robinson Jeffers, one of the most prominent American poets of the 20th century, is recorded in time by the newly published love letters between him and his eventual wife, Una. The volume, The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, With Selected Letters from Una Jeffers 1890-1930, is the first of three that will chronicle Jeffers’ life. The book is praised and quoted in a recent article by Cynthia Haven of the Stanford Report, “For those who think of Jeffers as the craggy, roughhewn poet of the Pacific Coast, the letters show something of the heart of the man who wrote: ‘I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man as a hawk.’”
Of course this is no ordinary biography. The editor of the collection, James Karman, actually calls it an “epistolary autobiography.” By putting the letters in chronological order, it is almost like hearing about the lives of Robinson and Una from their own minds. This work is evidence of how the poet’s life, love, and work lives on even into the next century.
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