Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the House & Home myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.You can hear the waves crashing below the stone house and tower that the environmentalist poet Robinson Jeffers built on a promontory in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. When we visit, “the day is a poem: but too much like one of Jeffers’”, as one of his own poems describes in a metafictional moment. The grey clouds, blustering winds and rain make it easy to see how this location inspired his rugged, elegiac imagery.“He’s probably one of the most important American poets, even though few people have heard of him,” says Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts, president of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation. “He’s probably more important today than he was in his own time because he was prescient and he understood what was happening environmentally and ecologically.” Jeffers (1887-1962) apprenticed himself to a stonemason to learn “the art to make stone love stone”, drawing granite from the cove to build Tor House in 1918-19. The structure was kept low to weather storms, with just a few small rooms, before a 1930s addition. Jeffers built Hawk Tower as a retreat for his wife Una, with a “dungeon” as a play space for their sons, and a turret where he could view the sea and the stars. The couple lived there until their deaths.The property is dotted with literary references and historic artefacts. Jeffers wrote on the walls, including lines from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and an homage to Thomas Hardy. Stones were his talismans — he used an unhewn tor for the house’s cornerstone and mixed meaningful rocks with the local granite in his masonry, including one from an Egyptian pyramid (a gift from a friend) and another picked up from WB Yeats’s tower home Thoor Ballylee, in County Galway. Each inclusion extolled what Jeffers called “the beauty of transhuman things”. Jeffers’ poems celebrate nature and how its significance surpasses humanity’s. “Star-Swirls” outlines the climate crisis decades before it entered mainstream awareness. “He changed as a poet and as a person when he began to look at life geologically,” says Ruchowitz-Roberts, who recites numerous Jeffers poems from memory during our tour. A philosophical rather than a technical poet, Jeffers’ work struck a chord with the public that earned him the cover of Time Magazine in 1932. His blank-verse narrative poems in the tradition of Walt Whitman also drew parallels to his somewhat more optimistic contemporary, Robert Frost. Jeffers’ education in classics informed his acclaimed 1947 Broadway staging of Medea, which was restaged in London in 2023. Starry visitors to the couple’s stony outcrop included Charlie Chaplin and the poet Langston Hughes. However, Jeffers’ philosophy of “inhumanism” — which he defined as “a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence” — included the principle of non-violence and was controversial, especially as it framed his opposition to the second world war. His popularity faded due to this stance, seen as unpatriotic.Jeffers planted some 2,000 trees on his original acreage, but many are gone: the home is now encircled by luxury houses, and a road divides it from the ocean’s edge. Jeffers felt keenly his fleeting presence in geological time: “If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes: / Perhaps of my planted forest a few / May stand yet”, he wrote in one of his poems. “You will know it by the wild sea- / fragrance of the wind . . . my ghost you needn’t look for; it is probably / Here, but a dark one, deep in the granite”.torhouse.orgFind out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
