The next year he married Una Call Kuster, and the following summer they planned a trip to England. In 1912 Jeffers published Flagons and Apples, a volume that contained little hint of his later distinctive and powerful style. After that, according to Jeffers’s account, came desultory years at the University of Southern California (USC), the University of Zurich, the USC School of Medicine, and the University of Washington, all with faint interest as he later stated, he “wasn’t deeply interested in anything but poetry.” He graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles at age eighteen. At the age of fifteen, Jeffers returned to the United States the next year, his family moved to California, the region Jeffers later chose as the background of his poetry. Some of their stops included Zurich (where he went to kindergarten), London, and Edinburgh. William Hamilton Jeffers, the first of two sons (the younger being future astronomer Hamilton Jeffers), John Robinson Jeffers spent a great deal of his childhood traveling in Europe with his parents. Drawing on the “beauty of things” in nature, Jeffers wrote poetry that highlighted the difference between the natural world and the condition of the modern man.Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) Died:īorn in 1887 to Annie Robinson Tuttle and the Reverend Dr. He is best known for his work about the central California coast and is considered an icon of the environmental movement. Jeffers was a giant among American poets. He later adopted the hawk icon as his symbol. Jeffers named it 'Hawk Tower' purportedly after a hawk that appeared often while he was building it. He began building it in 1920 and finished it four years later.

The tower was built entirely by Robinson Jeffers himself. Robinson Jeffers named it 'Tor House' after the type of ground on which the house was built.in southwest England a 'tor' is a granite outcrop. Tor House is located on Carmel Point in the central California village of Carmel-by-the-Sea. One of their two sons, Donnan, lived with his wife and family in the east wing (pictured at center-right in this photo) until 1999. The Jeffers family moved into the house in 1919 and lived there for the remainder of their lives. Tor House was the home of poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) and members of his family for more than eighty years.

Tor house tower hawk