Abstract
The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley is a significant presence in the work and thought of Robinson Jeffers. This presence owes itself in no small part to Una’s enthusiasm for Shelley, which she shared with Jeffers in the early days of their relationship; Shelley represents for them both the importance of breaking through conventional, inherited postures toward the world in favor of a genuine, honest approach to experience. But Shelley was an influence not only on the young Jeffers but throughout the American poet’s career, underpinning Jeffers’s advocacy of freedom and his condemnation of those who would suppress it—the king, the priest, the tyrant. From the early lyric “The Three Avilas” to the later narrative poem Mara, Shelley appears in Jeffers’s work both at the style and image level, with Jeffers adopting Shelleyan images and figures of speech, and also at the thematic level, where Jeffers advances a world view that, like Shelley’s, raises a defiant hand in the face of tyranny, whether that tyranny resides in an individual or in a set of customary cultural practices. The influence is subtle and far-ranging: it includes Jeffers’s adopting and adapting Shelley’s incest motif as an image of custom-shattering practice, and makes reference, too, to details of Shelley’s biography in the creation of certain characters and themes.
Recommended Citation
Reese, Steven
(2014)
"Jeffers in Context: The Presence of Shelley,"
Jeffers Studies: Vol. 18, Article 3.
Available at:
https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/js/vol18/iss1/3