In 1938, Random House published The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, a 600-page deluxe volume that drew from the collections Jeffers had published to that point in his career. For fifty years it was the most comprehensive and, and along with the 1935 Modern Library edition of Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems, the most widely circulated source of his work.
The Stanford University Press Selected Poetry builds from Jeffers’ original selection by adding poetry from the collections he published after 1938 and by substituting the corrected texts of the poems from the five-volume The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (also published by Stanford University Press).
The cover image to the left is a link to the Stanford University Press web page for this volume, which includes a table of contents, excerpts from reviews, and a description of the volume.
My editor’s Introduction, which provides a brief characterization of Jeffers’ career and a sketch of the procedure used to shape the volume, can be accessed by clicking on this link:
Introduction to The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers
I would like to thank the Stanford University Press for permission to post the Introduction here (please note that the Introduction is not covered by the Creative Commons license for this site; it is copyrighted by Stanford University Press, and that copyright governs its use).