Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish Nobel laureate, called Robinson Jeffers the most important English-language poet of the twentieth century, and predicted that his poems would be read as long as the language endured. Others likened him, during and after his lifetime, to Homer, the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, and Milton. Literary anthologies of the 1930s accorded him as much space as, or more than, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, or Wallace Stevens. Yet, thirty years later, he had all but disappeared from critical discussion; the most recent edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature (2012) does not include him at all. No poet of corresponding repute has ever suffered such a fall from favor in so short a time.

This neglect may at last be being reversed. Several new studies have recently appeared, as well as a three-volume edition of the Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers (2015), whose editor, James Karman, has produced this new biography of Jeffers to accompany it. There is renewed interest in Jeffers, not only in the literary world but among ecologists, students of history, and religious scholars.

The subtitle of Karman's biography, “Poet and Prophet,” suggests the complexities of Jeffers's reputation. Although the poems on which that reputation was based were chiefly long (and, even in Jeffers's time, unfashionable) narratives whose isolated, rural protagonists seemed far removed from the issues of modern life, Jeffers unfolded through them, and the shorter and dramatic poems that accompanied them, a remarkably comprehensive critique of the Western condition, and a challenge to its dominant assumptions. For some, he did assume the mantle of a prophet, a role he seemed at times to accept – as did his own poetic model, Yeats.

Prophets are best based in the mountains or the desert, and Jeffers found his own solitude in the country around Carmel on the central California coast. He lived a life of surface regularity, but there was considerable drama underneath, as the splendid edition of the Letters now documents in full. Nor was he the hermit that critical caricature suggests: the visitors and guests who sought him out, from Charlie Chaplin to Edwin Hubble, are an extraordinary roster of the literary, cultural, and even scientific elite of his time. What Jeffers did not engage in, however, was literary or other politicking of any sort. The absence of a coterie was costly.

Karman's new biography revisits the terrain of his previous one, Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California (1995), but from an altered perspective. Although not a full life-and-times study (which we are still awaiting), the present study links Jeffers throughout to the wider cultural world of his day, arguing persuasively that his response to it is indispensable to a proper valuation of his art.

The critical personal events in Jeffers's life occurred early: the finding of his mate, Una, and the discovery of his destined place, Carmel. Karman rounds off the first of his four chapters, however, with the outbreak of World War I and the death of the poet's father in December 1914. By that time, he was already married to Una and resident in Carmel. It is arguable, however, that only his father's death – and the long duel with his ghost that followed – freed Jeffers to find his poetic voice. Maturity did not come easily, and it was only in the early 1920s that he achieved it in the lyrics and narratives that brought him acclaim. Karman traces this process of development insightfully, noting Jeffers's own skeptical and equivocal response to his sudden fame. This chapter, too, ends with both a private and a public event: the Jefferses' long tour of the British Isles in 1929, and the onset of the Great Depression.

The 1930s were a period of personal as well as poetic crisis for Jeffers. The stresses in his marriage climaxed in Una's attempted suicide in 1938, an event coincident with a sense of creative exhaustion that did not fully lift until the end of World War II. Karman's final chapter traces Jeffers's last years; despite his sadness at Una's death, this was still an important phase of his career. “Together,” Karman writes of the couple, “they shaped an extraordinary life” (211). It is a finely judged comment on a relationship that, for all its tensions, was indispensable to begetting some of the most powerful and – as Karman, too, suggests – what may well be some of the most enduring verse of the twentieth century.