meaning of tor house poem by robinson jeffers

Adjacent to Tor House is Hawk Tower, reminiscent of the Norman Towers found in Ireland. Overlooking the Pacific, the home, a lovely cottage, is named Tor House. That the world and its waters, stones and stars have value beyond any human perspective.On a recent visit to Carmel, California, we stopped to see the home of the poet Robinson Jeffers. About his belief that humanity is immensely self-centered and generally indifferent to “the astonishing beauty of things.” About his philosophy of “inhumanism,” meaning not that we humans should try to be inhuman - we manage just fine there, after all - but that we should understand the world - the universe - to be inhuman, to be beyond human, larger and more important than human. Those few words say so much about Jeffers. The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason. The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts,Īnd unhuman nature its towering reality –įor man’s half dream man, you might say, is nature To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things – earth,īeast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars – Here’s Robinson Jeffers, in “The Beauty of Things” : He would write in the morning and build in the afternoon. While he worked he also constructed an overall “inhuman” philosophy, and honed his skill as a poet. The manual labor, he said, cleared his mind, and “my fingers had the art to make stone love stone.” Jeffers apprenticed himself to a local stone mason to learn that art, which he practiced the rest of his life. He hauled the huge stones up from the beach below with horse teams. Jeffers soon built their medieval-looking granite home, Tor House, and its stunning Hawk Tower, on what was then a barren, rocky knoll above Carmel Bay. Pricey, exclusive, even snowy Carmel was far in the future when Robinson Jeffers and his wife Una arrived in 1914. On the day Jeffers died here, January 20, 1962, it snowed - a rare event along any stretch of California’s coast. Lawrence, Edgar Lee Masters and George Sterling, who all appreciated his natural dramatic sense.

Vincent Millay, Charlie Chaplin, George Gershwin and other celebrities would visit him at the family home. Jeffers was reclusive, generally aloof from other coastal bohemians, though Langston Hughes, Edna St.

By Carl Van Vechten, via Wikimedia Commons

Meaning of tor house poem by robinson jeffers