Unrhymed verse was nothing new when Robinson Jeffers was a young man, but he’d written nothing but rhymed verse throughout his youth. By the time Jeffers hit thirty, unrhymed verse (in tandem with free verse) was gaining favor among American poets.

Robinson Jeffers was a classicist, much of his education having been in elite European schools. He and his wife Una had wished to move to England in 1914, but the Great War changed their plans. They remained in California, but they also remained steadfast Anglophyles, to say nothing of Una’s love for her Irish heritage.

The Anglo-Irish poet William Butler Yeats had written much in blank verse. Una adored Yeats, and there is little doubt that Yeats’s restoration of Thoor Ballylee inspired Una to inspire her husband’s tower project. Jeffers began his tower project in the very year Yeats’s blank verse masterwork “The Second Coming” was published. Jeffers had briefly played at blank verse ca. 1918, but he didn’t truly abandon rhyme until 1922, after two years of working on his tower.