America's Forgotten Doomer Poet

In the first half of the 20th century, there were few American poets more popular than Robinson Jeffers. The Californian wasn’t known for celebrating, though, so it’s no surprise that at the height of his fame, he was already looking beyond it. “Great poetry is pointed at the future,” he wrote in 1948, in an essay for the New York Times. “To be peered at and interviewed, to be pursued by idlers and autograph hunters and inquiring admirers, would surely be a sad nuisance… Whereas posthumous reputation could do you no harm at all, and is really the only kind worth considering.”