950s and early 1960s, and was completed by his eldest son. The completed residence was used as a family home until his descendants decided to turn it over to the Tor House Foundation, formed by Ansel Adams, for historic preservation. The romantic Gothic tower was named after a hawk that appeared while Jeffers was working on the structure, and which disappeared the day it was completed. The tower was a gift for his wife Una, who had a fascination for Irish literature and stone towers. In Una's special room on the second floor were kept many of her favorite items, photographs of Jeffers taken by the artist Weston, plants and dried flowers from Shelley's grave, and a rosewood melodeon which she loved to play. The tower also included a secret interior staircase – a source of great fun for his young sons.
During this time, Jeffers published volumes of long narrative blank verse that shook up the national literary scene. These poems, including Tamar and Roan Stallion, introduced Jeffers as a master of the epic form, reminiscent of ancient Greek poets. These poems were full of controversial subject matter such as incest, murder and parricide. Jeffers's short verse includes "Hurt Hawks," "The Purse-Seine" and "Shine, Perishing Republic." His intense relationship with the physical world is described in often brutal and apocalyptic verse, and demonstrates a preference for the natural world over what he sees as the negative influence of civilization. Jeffers did not accept the idea that meter is a fundamental part of poetry, and, like Marianne Moore, claimed his verse was not composed in meter, but "rolling stresses." He believed meter was imposed on poetry by man and not a fundamental part of its nature.
Many books followed Jeffers's initial success with the epic form, including an adaptation of Euripides' Medea, which became a hit Broadway play starring Dame Judith Anderson.
George Sterling and Jeffers were good friends. Fellow poets Edgar Lee Masters and, longer, Benjamin De Casseres, were correspondents. Jeffers encountered D.H. Lawrence in Mabel Dodge Luhan's circle at Taos; reports how well they got along vary. While living in Carmel, Jeffers became the focal point for a small but devoted group of admirers. At the peak of his fame, he was one of the few poets to be featured on the cover of Time magazine. He was asked to read at the Library of Congress, and was posthumously put on a U.S. postage stamp.
Jeffers' 1948 collection, The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948), included several poems critical of American involvement in the Second World War and his publisher, Random House, suppressed more and included a note that Jeffers' views were not those of the publishing company. The book was negatively reviewed by several critics, including poets Yvor Winters and Kenneth Rexroth. By 1977 Jeffers' reservations seemed prescient and Liveright published "'The Double-Axe & Other Poems including Eleven Suppressed Poems, with an important introduction by William Everson, Jeffers' major posthumous poet advocate and inheritor. Throughout the fifties and afterward Jeffers figured as an important voice for the worth and rights of the natural world as the environmental movement gathered strength. The photographer Ansel Adams was a close ally in this, and long friend, as was Edward Weston.
Jeffers coined the word "inhumanism": the belief that humankind is too self-centered and too indifferent to the "astonishing beauty of things." In the poem "Carmel Point" Jeffers called on humans to "uncenter" themselves. In "The Double Axe" Jeffers explicitly described "inhumanism" as "...a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to 'notman'; the rejection of human solipsism, and recognition of the trans-human magnificence...This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist...It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy...it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty."In The Loyalties of Robinson Jeffers, the first in-d