Not Man Apart: Lines from Robinson Jeffers, photographs of the Big Sur Coast; David Brower, editor (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club, 1965; out of print, but available) Reading lines from the poetry of Robinson Jeffers while looking at the stunning photographs by Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Philip Hyde, Steve Crouch, and others, pulls you into the Big Sur landscape, amazing you with its beauty, while inspiring you to care for this extraordinary coastline. Not Man Apart was one in a “series” of exceptional exhibition books published by the Sierra Club.
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 jaggardness 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. – from “Foreword,” by Loren Eisley, Not Man Apart
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