Poet Robinson Jeffers and wife, Una, ‘tell their own story’ in newly published letters

The 1,000-page first volume of the Collected Letters, published by Stanford University Press, is an “epistolary autobiography” of one of America’s greatest poets, Robinson Jeffers. The volume includes correspondence between Robinson and Una, who was his married lover before she was his wife. It also includes letters Una Jeffers wrote to her jilted husband.

BY CYNTHIA HAVEN

They fell madly in love. But she was married to a wealthy and prominent Los Angeles attorney. Her lover, Robinson Jeffers, three years younger, was an unemployed student who drank too much. The affair hit the front page of the Los Angeles Times in 1913.
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“Una did not want a divorce, despite the torrid romance,” said scholar James Karman, editor of The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers, Vol. I, newly published by Stanford University Press. She went to Europe to think it over, sending hundreds of pages of letters to her husband “asking for forgiveness, a second chance,” he said.
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She didn’t get one. The letters to Teddie Kuster, her jilted spouse, and her future husband, Jeffers (1887-1962), one of the greatest American poets of the last century, are included in the volume’s nearly 1,000 pages, which cover the years from 1890 to 1930.
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“I’ll say he’s the most important poet of the 20th century, but nobody’s buying that yet,” said Karman. “No one in the 20th century came near to what he was trying to do. The sheer scope of his endeavor is unrivaled. There’s nothing like it in American literature in the 20th century.”
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According to Tim Hunt, editor of Stanford University Press’ five-volume Collected Poetry, Jeffers is “the least understood of the major American poets from the first half of the 20th century.” The projected three-volume series of letters is fully annotated, with a substantial introduction to Jeffers’ life and work.

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