unfashionable things

Fashions, forms of machinery, the more complex social, financial, political adjustments, and so forth, are all ephemeral, exceptional; they exist but will never exist again. Poetry must concern itself with (relatively) permanent things. These have poetic value; the ephemeral has only news value.

—Robinson Jeffers, forward to Selected Poems (p. XV)

more primitive than prose

Poetry is more primitive than prose. It existed before prose and will exist afterward, it is not domesticated, it is wilder and more natural. It belongs out-doors, it has tides as nature has; while prose is a cultured interior thing, prose is of the house, where lamplight abolishes even the tides of day and night, and human caprice rules. The brain can make prose; the whole man, brain and nerves, muscles and entrails, organs of sense and of generation, makes poetry and responds to poetry.

—Robinson Jeffers, "Preface" (June 1922)

confused epoch

...it is not necessary, because an epoch is confused, that its poets should share its confusions.

—Robinson Jeffers, "Poetry, Gongorism and a Thousand Years"

make stone love stone

It seemed to me that Robinson Jeffers was building that house for years and years. Sometimes I'd see rocks piled out there and it looked like he couldn't make up his mind which one to use and they'd be there for a long period of time and then finally they would find a place in these walls that were going up.

—Thomas Gordon Greene, recounting Robinson Jeffers building by hand the 'Tor House', in Carmel CA. (Quoted in "Don't Pave Main Street-Carmel's Heritage," a 113 minute color film, copyright 1994 by Carmel Heritage).