Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[55] before being promptly republished as Songs of the Sierras. Of the many volumes that followed, none fulfilled the promise that readers not unnaturally found in the Songs. He wrote dramas, too, and novels, uniformly without success.

Little as Joaquin Miller had in common with the Pre-Raphaelites, his view of poetry—‘To me a poem is a picture,’ he stated at a Rossetti dinner—was not uncongenial to them. One would expect his work to be concerned with action first of all, but it is not: nearly always the action, even in the ostensibly narrative poems, is subordinate to the description. He loved the West as he loved nothing else, and his best work is a pictorial treatment of it: the West from Central America to Alaska, from the Great Plains to the coast, its grand Sierras,— ‘white stairs of heaven,’—its canyons, its great rivers, its ocean, —‘the great white, braided, bounding sea,’—its chaparral and manzanita, its buffaloes and noble horses, its stars overhead ‘large as lilies.’ Then the figures that peopled this vast setting—gold-miners, Indians, Mexicans, and the romantic adventurers who are commonly his heroes, restless, rebellious, and misunderstood. All these Miller had lived among till he knew them as well as he, at least, could know anything, and in his best work they stand forth vividly. His poems of the personal life are forgotten, but the power of Yosemite lives. One reads again and again, with renewed pleasure, such poems as Exodus for Oregon and Westward Ho!, which picture the heroic wanderings of the pioneers across the continent, ‘A mighty nation moving west,’ in long wagon trains, with their yoked steers, shouting drivers, crashing whips, ‘blunt, untutor'd men,’ and ‘brave and silent women.’ This westward movement is the theme of Miller's most impressive poems, from Columbus who sailed ‘on and on’ (a phrase that recurs repeatedly in these poems) to The last Taschastas, an old chief who is driven, in an open boat, from the Pacific shore, as the Indians of the Atlantic coast had been driven westward centuries earlier. More than anyone else, Joaquin Miller is the poet of our receding frontier.

In narrative poetry he could use to the full his immense energy, which is his chief excellence. He was not a man of ideas; he reflected objectively less perhaps than Byron, and certainly was less fond of introspection, despite his later years