“Imaginative power activated by strong emotion”

Naming the quality he prized most in poetic composition · Letter to Camille McCole, May 1930

• Emotion
• Imagination

“No lines of print will ever intoxicate me as Rossetti's rather florid verses did.”

Recalling the overwhelming force of his first encounter with poetry · Essay, Remembered Verses, 1933

• Poetry
• Reading

“The happiest and freest man is the scientist investigating nature.”

Valuing attention turned outward over self-absorption · Essay, Themes in My Poems, 1941

• Nature
• Science

“Our ends tend to be rather sad, and we bawl at birth.”

A wry note on mortality bracketing a life · Letter to Jake Zeitlin, March 1935

• Life
• Mortality

“If you like it, listen to it; if not, let it alone.”

Insisting poetry owes its audience nothing beyond its own beauty · Essay, Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years, New York Times, 1948

• Freedom
• Poetry

“It belongs out-doors, it has tides as nature has.”

Describing poetry as wild and natural rather than domestic · Preface, June 1922

• Nature
• Poetry

“One rock versus a thousand pebbles.”

Contrasting the weight of old words with the scatter of modern speech · Letter to Frederic I. Carpenter, September 1943

• Language
• Thought

“I decided not to tell lies in verse.”

Setting emotional honesty as the governing rule of his craft · Foreword, The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, 1938

• Honesty
• Truth

“I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are interdependent, and therefore one part cannot be separated from the whole.”

Expressing Jeffers’s philosophy of the interconnectedness of life and the nonhuman world · Essay, Credo

• Integration
• Nature
• Philosophy