The greatest beauty is organic wholeness,
the wholeness of life and things,            
the divine beauty of the universe.          
Love that, not man apart from that . . . 

 

Not Man Apart

lines from ROBINSON JEFFERS

 

Photographs of the Big Sur Coast

by Ansel Adams, Morley Baer, Wynn Bullack,
Steve Crouch, William E. Garnett, Phillip Hyde,
Eliot Porter, Cole Weston, Edward weston,
Don Worth, Cedric Wright, and others

EDITED BY DAVID BROWER


Sierra ClubSan Francisco ©1965

from the foreword . . .

. . . No one reading Jeffers can escape the impress of the untamed Pacific environment upon which he brooded. He was its most powerful embodiment -- an incarnation of the spirit of place so intense as to epitomize Lawrence's demand that there be no deflection between the poet and what he expresses. Jeffers' peculiarly distinctive style, developed by degrees from the unpromising conventional prosody of his youth, has the roll of surf and the jaggedness of rocks about it. Something utterly wild had crept into his mind and marked his features. I cannot imagine him as having arisen unchanged in another countryside. The sea-beaten coast, the fierce freedom of its hunting hawks, possessed and spoke through him. It was one of the most uncanny and complete relationships between a man and his natural background that I know in literature. It tells us something of the power of the western landscape here at the world's end where the last of the American dream turned inward upon itself.

LOREN EISELEY