The Sea Needs No Ornament

The first collection in twenty years of essays on Robinson Jeffers, one of the great American poets of the twentieth century, this work signals the sea change in Jeffers scholarship, as well as the increasing breadth and depth of criticism of the literature of the American West. The essays assembled here highlight issues and theories critical to Jeffers studies, among them the advance of ecocriticism, the reimagining of regionalism as place studies, the continuing development of cultural studies and the new historicism, the increasingly poignant vector of science and literature, the new formalism, particularly as it pertains to narrative verse, and the glaring omission of feminist analysis in Jeffers scholarship. Jeffers has always appealed to a wider audience than many twentieth-century poets, and this book will speak to that general readership as well as to scholars and students.