Unrhymed verse was nothing new when Robinson Jeffers was a young man, but he’d written nothing but rhymed verse throughout his youth. By the time Jeffers hit thirty, unrhymed verse (in tandem with free verse) was gaining favor among American poets.
Robinson Jeffers was a classicist, much of his education having been in elite European schools. He and his wife Una had wished to move to England in 1914, but the Great War changed their plans. They remained in California, but they also remained steadfast Anglophyles, to say nothing of Una’s love for her Irish heritage.
The Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats had written much in blank verse. Una adored Yeats, and there is little doubt that Yeats’s restoration of Thoor Ballylee inspired Una to inspire her husband’s tower project. Jeffers began his tower project in the very year Yeats’s blank verse masterwork “The Second Coming” was published. Jeffers had briefly played at blank verse ca. 1918, but he didn’t truly abandon rhyme until 1922, after two years of working on his tower.
Year | Poet | Poem |
---|---|---|
1902 | E.A. Robinson | Isaac and Archibald |
1912 | Ezra Pound | The Return |
1913 | Ezra Pound | The Garden |
1915 | Ezra Pound | The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter |
1914 | Robert Frost | Mending Wall |
1914 | Robert Frost | The Death of the Hired Man |
1916 | Robert Frost | Birches |
1914 | Amy Lowell | Absence |
1914 | Amy Lowell | Fool’s Money Bags |
1914 | Amy Lowell | Vintage |
1915 | Edgar Lee Masters | The Hill |
1915 | Edgar Lee Masters | Cassius Hueffer |
1915 | Edgar Lee Masters | Knowlt Hoheimer |
1915 | Edgar Lee Masters | Elsa Wertman |
1915 | Edgar Lee Masters | Elliott Hawkins |
1915 | Edgar Lee Masters | Jonathan Houghton |
1915 | Edgar Lee Masters | Father Malloy |
1915 | Edgar Lee Masters | Herman Altman |
1915 | Wallace Stevens | Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock |
1915+ | Wallace Stevens | Sunday Morning |
1916 | H.D. | Oread |
1916 | H.D. | Sea Rose |
1916 | H.D. | Heat |
1916 | Carl Sandburg | Chicago |
1918 | Carl Sandburg | Grass |
1920 | Carl Sandburg | Ossawatomie |
1919 | Wallace Stevens | Anecdote of the Jar |
1921 | Wallace Stevens | The Snow Man |
1917 | William Carlos Williams | Tract |
1921 | William Carlos Williams | Queen Anne’s Lace |
1921 | William Carlos Williams | The Widow’s Lament in Springtime |
1921 | William Carlos Williams | The Great Figure |
1920 | T.S. Eliot | Gerontion |
1922 | T.S. Eliot | The Waste Land |
1921 | Marianne Moore | When I Buy Pictures |
1921 | Marianne Moore | Poetry |