epth study of Jeffers not written by one of his circle, poet and critic J. Radcliffe Squires addresses the question of a reconciliation of the beauty of the world and potential beauty in mankind: "Jeffers has asked us to look squarely at the universe. He has told us that materialism has its message, its relevance, and its solace. These are different from the message, relevance, and solace of humanism. Humanism teaches us best why we suffer, but materialism teaches us how to suffer."
His poems have been translated into many languages and published all over the world. Outside of the United States he is most popular in Japan and the Czech Republic. William Everson, Edward Abbey, Robert McDowell, Gary Snyder, and Mark Jarman are just a few recent authors who have been influenced by Jeffers. Charles Bukowski remarked that Jeffers was his favorite poet. Polish poet Czesław Miłosz also took an interest in Jeffers's poetry and worked as a translator for several volumes of his poems. Jeffers also exchanged some letters with his Czech translator and popularizer, the poet Kamil Bednář. Writer Paul Mooney (1904–1939), son of American Indian authority James Mooney (1861–1921) and collaborator of travel writer Richard Halliburton (1900–1939), "was known always to carry with him (a volume of Jeffers) as a chewer might carry a pouch of tobacco ... and, like Jeffers," writes Gerry Max in Horizon Chasers, "worshipped nature ... (taking) refuge (from the encroachments of civilization) in a sort of chthonian mysticism rife with Greek dramatic elements ..."Jeffers was an inspiration and friend to western U.S. photographers of the early 20th century, including Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Morley Baer. In fact, the elegant book of Baer's photographs juxtaposed with Jeffers's poetry, combines the creative talents of those two residents of the Big Sur coast.
Although Jeffers largely was marginalized in the mainstream academic community for decades, several important contemporary literary critics, including Albert Gelpi of Stanford University, and poet, critic and NEA chairman Dana Gioia, have consistently cited Jeffers as a formidable presence in modern literature.
His poem "The Beaks of Eagles" was included in the track "California Saga" on The Beach Boys album Holland (1973).
Two lines from Jeffers's poem "We Are Those People" are quoted toward the end of the 2008 film Visioneers.
Several lines from Jeffers's poem "Wise Men in Their Bad Hours" ("Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made / Something more equal to the centuries / Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.") appear in Christopher McCandless' diary.
Robinson Jeffers is mentioned in the 2004 film I Heart Huckabees by the character Albert Markovski played by Jason Schwartzman, when defending Jeffers as a nature writer against another character's claim that environmentalism is socialism. Markovski says "Henry David Thoreau, Robinson Jeffers, the National Geographic Society...all socialists?"
A passage from Jeffers's poem "Ghost" was read in the Ghost Adventures episode "Tor House", where the Ghost Adventures crew investigated Jeffers's house to see if Jeffers's spirit would appear 50 years later after his death as was said in his poem.
In A Secular Age, a critique of Western secularization, philosopher Charles Taylor presents Jeffers as an important literary example of "immanent anti-humanism" alongside figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Cormac McCarthy. Invoking (often at length) the poems "At the Birth of an Age," "Invasion," "Rock and Hawk," "Tamar," and "The Women at Point Sur," Taylor sees Jeffers as encouraging human beings to embrace the beautiful cruelty of an indifferent universe.Poet Adrienne Rich quotes Jeffers's poem "Prelude" in her poem "Yom Kippur 1984".Stanford University Press released a five-volume collection of the complete works of Robinson Jeffers. In an article titled "A Black Sheep Joins the Fold", written upon the release of the collection in 2001, Stanford Magazine commented that it was remarkable that, due to a number of circumstance