“Peacock Ranch,” “Sea Passions,” and “Confession on Caucasus,” among others, are featured in the various tables of contents for collections he assembled in this period but not included in Tamar, even though earlier work (“Fauna,” “Mal Paso Bridge,” “The Truce and the Peace”) did wind up in the volume. Jeffers, for the most part, omitted the poems he’d written in 1919 from Tamar. It draws us back to consider the still relatively unexamined work of 1919 written when the “inevitable” hadn’t, as yet, become inevitable. The 100 th anniversary of the construction of Tor House offers an occasion to celebrate its significance for Jeffers and his work-indeed its centrality to both the reality and myth of the “inevitable place.” It also offers an occasion to consider how Jeffers might have regarded Tor House in the summer of 1919 as he was helping to build it and in the months he first lived there-a time when he hadn’t yet found his vision or voice or authority as a poet. And it obscures how much of what Jeffers wrote in the years before the meditative lyrics and startling narrative that make Tamar and Other Poems so memorable has nothing directly to do with either his “inevitable place” as he’d come to define it or the perspective that evolved into what he’d later term Inhumanism. It skips over the apprentice searching for an artistic vision and the technique to manifest it. It conflates the cozy art colony of Carmel with the sparsely populated ranch country and stark beauty of the Big Sur coast. There’s a seeming rightness to this scenario, but whatever its higher truth as a tale of origin, this scenario mythologizes and simplifies the process by which the actual Jeffers became JEFFERS. Robinson Jeffers, in various prose pieces after he was famous, invites us to believe his move to Carmel and discovering his “inevitable place” was the catalyst for his transformation from the conventional, apprentice figure of Flagons and Apples (1912) to the originality and power of Tamar and Other Poems (1924).
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