Robinson decided to be the apprentice to the contractor of the house so that he could build the tower by himself. He chose the rugged, wind-battered but beautiful coastal land to settle with his wife Una and their two sons. This house and tower were built by a poet named Robinson Jeffers in the 1920’s. Visit the Tor House Foundation website for hours, admission fees, and more information.Nestled between the golf courses and swanky homes of Carmel, California, is a home that is both striking and strikingly out of place: a stone house reminiscent of an English Tudor cottage, with a two-story stone tower, almost cartoon-like because of the giant stones, standing alone in the center of the garden. Managed by the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation, the Tor House is open for tours, and poetry programs and readings are presented throughout the year. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, Charles Lindbergh, George Gershwin, and Charlie Chaplin.

The Jeffers family also entertained many influential literary and cultural celebrities there, among them Sinclair Lewis, Edna St. His poem ' Rock and Hawk' is a perfect example of his belief in the dramatic, and often tragic, power of nature: Here is a symbol in whichĪlmost all of Jeffers’s writing was done at Tor House. Nearby, Jeffers also built a forty-foot stone structure-Hawk Tower-selecting and laying each stone himself.īoth the Tower and the coastal landscape figure strongly in Jeffers’s poetry, much of which celebrates the awesome beauty of the hills and ravines that plunged into the Pacific. In 1919, he began building a stone cottage overlooking Carmel Bay that he called Tor House, after the craggy knoll, or 'tor', on which it was built. After marrying in 1913, he and his wife, Una, settled in Carmel, California. The poet Robinson Jeffers was born in 1887 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and moved to California with his family as a teenager.

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