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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