Robinson Jeffers, the Art Worker and the ‘Carmel Idea’

Poet Robinson Jeffers’ conflicted relationship with Carmel’s tourist economy and his own role, as its widely-recognized poet laureate, within it provides the focus of the second chapter in this section. Concentrating on the early, notorious narrative, Tamar (1924), this chapter extends a discussion of modernist primitivism in Carmel to show how Jeffers reformulates what might otherwise be understood as an exotic and entertaining spectacle of local colour as a scathing political commentary that is aimed both locally and globally. Tamar, a terrifying poem that centres on a dissolute young man who fantasizes about going off to war as a pilot in order to escape problems at home, indicates how the experience of international war profoundly affects the lives of a pastoral farming community on the West Coast. As Jeffers shows, being far from the national capitols of government and culture neither isolates nor insulates the family from modern violence. Further, the poem presents the tragedy of the World War as divine retribution for the long and violent history of Western colonialism and imperialism, material and spiritual traces of which have collected on Carmel’s gorgeous beachfront property.