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Cawdor & Medea
The verse narrative Cawdor, set on the ruthless California coast which Jeffers knew so well, tells a simple tale: an aging widower, Cawdor, unwilling to relinquish his youth, knowingly marries a young girl who does not love him. She falls in love with his son, Hood, and the narrative unfolds in tragedy of immense proportions. Medea is a verse adaptation of Euripides' drama and was created especially for the actress Judith Anderson. Their combined genius made the play one of the outstanding successes of the 1940s. In Medea, Jeffers relentlessly drove toward what Ralph Waldo Emerson had called "the proper tragic element" terror.
191 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1970
6 people are currently reading
187 people want to read
About the author
Robinson Jeffers
125 books203 followersCollections of American poet John Robinson Jeffers, who sets many of his works in California, include Tamar and Other Poems (1924).
He knew the central coast and wrote mostly in classic narrative and epic form. Nevertheless, people today know also his short verse and consider him an symbol of the environmental movement.
The Harry Ransom humanities research center at the University of Texas at Austin and the libraries at Occidental College, the University of California, and Yale University collect many manuscripts and materials of Jeffers. Survivors published a collection of his letters posthumously as The Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, 1887–1962 (1968). Jeffers wrote other books or criticism and poetry: are: Poetry, Gongorism, and a Thousand Years (1949), Themes in My Poems (1956), Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems (1965), The Alpine Christ and Other Poems (1974), What Odd Expedients" and Other Poems (1981), and Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems by Robinson Jeffers (1987).
Stanford University Press recently 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 ably remarked that due to a number of circumstances, "there was never an authoritative, scholarly edition of California’s premier bard" until Stanford published the complete works.
Biographical studies include George Sterling, Robinson Jeffers: The Man and the Artist (1926); Louis Adamic, Robinson Jeffers (1929); Melba Bennett, Robinson Jeffers and the Sea (1936) and The Stone Mason of Tor House (1966); Edith Greenan, Of Una Jeffers (1939); Mabel Dodge Luhan, Una and Robin (1976; written in 1933); Ward Ritchie, Jeffers: Some Recollections of Robinson Jeffers (1977); and James Karman, Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California (1987). Books about Jeffers's career include L. C. Powell, Robinson Jeffers: The Man and His Work (1940; repr. 1973); William Everson, Robinson Jeffers: Fragments of an Older Fury (1968); Arthur B. Coffin, Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Inhumanism (1971); Bill Hotchkiss, Jeffers: The Sivaistic Vision (1975); James Karman, ed., Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers (1990); Alex Vardamis The Critical Reputation of Robinson Jeffers (1972); and Robert Zaller, ed., Centennial Essays for Robinson Jeffers (1991). The Robinson Jeffers Newsletter, ed. Robert Brophy, is a valuable scholarly resource.
In a rare recording, Jeffers can be heard reading his "The Day Is A Poem" (September 19, 1939) on Poetry Speaks – Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath, Narrated by Charles Osgood (Sourcebooks, Inc., c2001), Disc 1, #41; including text, with Robert Hass on Robinson Jeffers, pp. 88–95. Jeffers was also on the cover of Time – The Weekly Magazine, April 4, 1932 (pictured on p. 90. Poetry Speaks).
"Jeffers Studies", a journal of research on the poetry of Robinson Jeffers and related topics, is published semi-annually by the Robinson Jeffers Association.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 15, 2021
Jeffers was clearly possessed of a deeply-mythological poetics. From his "Roan Stallion" (not included in this collection):
His central epiphany is the immanence of transcendence, playing out in the sphere of nature as a field of constant interchange between life and death, renewal and decay. A vision of this sort has guided many a poet's hand, though I would say rarely with such a ruthless lack of sentimentality. There is nothing bucolic or sylvan in his wilderness, and this cold clarity appeals to the modern sensibility.
I'm quite sympathetic to his long narrative poems. His favored form was free-verse epics dealing with unlearned folk in the vicinity of Carmel and Big Sur, where he lived for most of his years. The eponymous work "Cawdor" is well over a hundred pages long, more of a novella in verse form.
For Jeffers, life appears to be principally characterized by relentless, dumb endurance in the face of terrible suffering and injury. His focus is on the human animal at its limits, but that feels to me like a small part of the full spectrum of human experience. For most people most of the time, I think, life is not like a Sophocles play. On the contrary, what the Greek tragedian foregrounded as extraordinary has become for Jeffers the basic fact of life, and that, I think, is not altogether correct.
As an aside, one of the great unsolved problems in literature is how to persuasively make uneducated people philosophical. The problem is usually that the author has philosophical interests but wants to write about plain folks. What to do?
Jeffers's approach is to heap misfortune on them, so we can accept that they will become reflective in their extremity. I find this unpersuasive, because people may become more reflective in the midst of difficulty, but they will not become more analytical.
The fire threw up figures
And symbols meanwhile, racial myths formed and dissolved in
it, the phantom rulers of humanity
That without being are yet more real than what they are born of,
and without shape, shape that which makes them:
The nerves and the flesh go by shadowlike, the limbs and the lives
shadowlike, these shadows remain, these shadows
To whom temples, to whom churches, to whom labors and wars,
visions and dreams are dedicate….
His central epiphany is the immanence of transcendence, playing out in the sphere of nature as a field of constant interchange between life and death, renewal and decay. A vision of this sort has guided many a poet's hand, though I would say rarely with such a ruthless lack of sentimentality. There is nothing bucolic or sylvan in his wilderness, and this cold clarity appeals to the modern sensibility.
I'm quite sympathetic to his long narrative poems. His favored form was free-verse epics dealing with unlearned folk in the vicinity of Carmel and Big Sur, where he lived for most of his years. The eponymous work "Cawdor" is well over a hundred pages long, more of a novella in verse form.
For Jeffers, life appears to be principally characterized by relentless, dumb endurance in the face of terrible suffering and injury. His focus is on the human animal at its limits, but that feels to me like a small part of the full spectrum of human experience. For most people most of the time, I think, life is not like a Sophocles play. On the contrary, what the Greek tragedian foregrounded as extraordinary has become for Jeffers the basic fact of life, and that, I think, is not altogether correct.
As an aside, one of the great unsolved problems in literature is how to persuasively make uneducated people philosophical. The problem is usually that the author has philosophical interests but wants to write about plain folks. What to do?
Jeffers's approach is to heap misfortune on them, so we can accept that they will become reflective in their extremity. I find this unpersuasive, because people may become more reflective in the midst of difficulty, but they will not become more analytical.
March 5, 2011
"Cawdor" = a poem in blank verse, set on the California coast, roughly based on the Greek story of Phaedra. Cawdor, an old farmer, marries Fera Martial, a neighbor's daughter; but Fera is in love with Cawdor's son Hood. Hubris, lust, human tragedy situated within a carefully observed natural world, a high classical style, some stunning poetry.
In my favorite passage, Jeffers imagines the conscious experience of the dying brain of a man whose skull is broken by his fall off a cliff. As the neural connections break down, consciousness regresses through primal desires, then splits into fragments before it is quiet. I don't think it's especially neurologically accurate, but it's an intensely creative vision of the limits of human existence in the material world.
The title of this book is listed incorrectly. The volume contains two different works: "Cawdor: A Long Poem" and "Medea: After Euripides."
In my favorite passage, Jeffers imagines the conscious experience of the dying brain of a man whose skull is broken by his fall off a cliff. As the neural connections break down, consciousness regresses through primal desires, then splits into fragments before it is quiet. I don't think it's especially neurologically accurate, but it's an intensely creative vision of the limits of human existence in the material world.
The title of this book is listed incorrectly. The volume contains two different works: "Cawdor: A Long Poem" and "Medea: After Euripides."
August 10, 2016
The Californian poet Robinson Jeffers described his written work as, "An exhibition of essential elements by the burning away through pain and ruin of inertia and the unessential," and Cawdor is the work that I value the most.
As a Carmel native, I treasure my souvenirs of Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems (1965) by Robinson Jeffers [Calm and Full the ocean], (Love that,) Not Man Apart (from that): Photographs of the Big Sur Coast, Lines From Robinson Jeffers [Photographs of the Big Sur Coast] (1969) by David Brower and Robinson Jeffers [The Beaks of Eagles-The Beach Boys (1973)] and Medea: Freely adapted from the Medea by Euripides by Robinson Jeffers, signed "Sincerely, Robinson Jeffers" for my mother, a dramatic lit major from UC Berkely who sewed costumes for Carmel, CA's Golden Bough Theater. Later, I borrowed and admired copies of Roan Stallion, Tamar, The Double Axe, and The Women at Point Sur.
Back to Cawdor wherein the poet writes, "My father--his thoughts were deep,
Patient and wise--believed it [life] was good because it was growing.
At first, it was a morsel of slime in the sea,
It grew to be worms and fishes, lizards and snakes [and eagles (iconic to RB)],
You see the progress the progress, then the things with hair and hot blood,
It was coming up from the ocean and climbing mountains,
Subduing the earth, molding its bundle of nerves
In the magnificent mind of man, and passing
Beyond man, to more wonders. That helped my father!
He loved that. You and me, of course, it can't help,
Because we know nothing goes on forever.
What good is better and better if best draws a blank?"
As a Carmel native, I treasure my souvenirs of Robinson Jeffers: Selected Poems (1965) by Robinson Jeffers [Calm and Full the ocean], (Love that,) Not Man Apart (from that): Photographs of the Big Sur Coast, Lines From Robinson Jeffers [Photographs of the Big Sur Coast] (1969) by David Brower and Robinson Jeffers [The Beaks of Eagles-The Beach Boys (1973)] and Medea: Freely adapted from the Medea by Euripides by Robinson Jeffers, signed "Sincerely, Robinson Jeffers" for my mother, a dramatic lit major from UC Berkely who sewed costumes for Carmel, CA's Golden Bough Theater. Later, I borrowed and admired copies of Roan Stallion, Tamar, The Double Axe, and The Women at Point Sur.
Back to Cawdor wherein the poet writes, "My father--his thoughts were deep,
Patient and wise--believed it [life] was good because it was growing.
At first, it was a morsel of slime in the sea,
It grew to be worms and fishes, lizards and snakes [and eagles (iconic to RB)],
You see the progress the progress, then the things with hair and hot blood,
It was coming up from the ocean and climbing mountains,
Subduing the earth, molding its bundle of nerves
In the magnificent mind of man, and passing
Beyond man, to more wonders. That helped my father!
He loved that. You and me, of course, it can't help,
Because we know nothing goes on forever.
What good is better and better if best draws a blank?"
March 20, 2016
I've long been a fan of Jeffers' poetry, but had not read Cawdor. I really liked this California tragedy with hints of ancient epics. It's dark, but reads very well, especially if you enjoy tragedies (the literary kind, I mean.)
I've had a closer relationship to Medea. I played Creon in this version of the play, many years ago, in college, but I hadn't read it again for many years. Although I love the original by Euripides, this recasting is powerful as well. Short, dark, and not particularly subtle, but beautifully written and wonderfully horrific.
If, as I was, you are in the mood for something dark on an early spring weekend, pick this one up.
I've had a closer relationship to Medea. I played Creon in this version of the play, many years ago, in college, but I hadn't read it again for many years. Although I love the original by Euripides, this recasting is powerful as well. Short, dark, and not particularly subtle, but beautifully written and wonderfully horrific.
If, as I was, you are in the mood for something dark on an early spring weekend, pick this one up.
October 20, 2009
Brother Antoninus (William Everson), in the introduction to this book makes a derisive reference to a derisive critique of Jeffers by Yvor Winters. In aesthetics, as many other things, I seem unconsciously attracted to opposites. Perhaps I have an amazing power of synthesis or a high tolerance for dissonance or maybe I just don't know what is going on.
Cawdor is one of Jeffers' "nicer" narratives. No incest, or mutilation or putrefaction but dark enough, a good transition from the Sierra Club Hawk and Nature lovers to Jeffers' Inhumanism.
Cawdor is one of Jeffers' "nicer" narratives. No incest, or mutilation or putrefaction but dark enough, a good transition from the Sierra Club Hawk and Nature lovers to Jeffers' Inhumanism.
February 18, 2025
Five stars is for Cawdor with its rich imagery, lyrical and fluid narration, and emotional impact. One of my favorites among works of 20th Century poets; on par with the best by T.S. Elliot or Ursula Le Guin, I'd say.
Four stars for Medea which gets rather violent for my taste.
I have numerous post-its in Cawdor to guide me back to my favorite passages - page 41 is just amazing.
Four stars for Medea which gets rather violent for my taste.
I have numerous post-its in Cawdor to guide me back to my favorite passages - page 41 is just amazing.
November 12, 2020
The long poem Cawdor is devastating and original despite echoes of MacBeth and Hippolytus. Jeffers's translation of Medea is faithful (as best I remember) and hard-hitting, the language raw and direct.
April 24, 2018
5 stars for Medea, a superb adaptation of Euripides. 4 for Cawdor, a lean tragic novel in verse.
March 12, 2021
2021.29: Enchanted by inhumanism.
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November 6, 2008I don't know enough about Medea to review this translation. I'd like to hear from other readers who might be able to help me put this book in context or recommend other translations.
I find Jeffers' world view, as expressed in his poetry, to be unnecessarily bleak. His preference of Nature to civilization offends my humanist sensibilities. I can't help but wonder if what I found unpleasant about Medea is located in the original text or in Jeffers translation of it.
I find Jeffers' world view, as expressed in his poetry, to be unnecessarily bleak. His preference of Nature to civilization offends my humanist sensibilities. I can't help but wonder if what I found unpleasant about Medea is located in the original text or in Jeffers translation of it.
February 7, 2011
Raw, dawg.
October 14, 2007
My favorite fiction of all time
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews