Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) is not only the greatest poet that California (and indeed the American West) has produced but a major poet of the twentieth century who occupies a prominent place in the tradition of American prophetic poetry. Jeffers consciously set himself apart from the poetry of his generation - by physical isolation at his home in Carmel, by his unusual poetic form, and by his stance as an ‘anti-modernist’. Yet his work represents a profound, and profoundly original, artistic response to problems that shaped modernist poetry and that still perplex poets today: how to reconcile scientific and artistic discourses and modes of vision; how to connect present-day experience to myths perceived as lying at the origins of human culture; how to renew the poetic language; and how (or whether) to present art’s claim to moral, spiritual, or epistemological seriousness within representations of modern phenomena.