Soon I was stronger, body and soul. The women gave me gold—from whence?—and I being a "renegade," descended to San Francisco and set sail for Boston, but stopped at Nicaragua with Walker. Thence up the coast to Oregon, when strong enough. I went home, went to college some, taught school some, studied law at home some; but ever and ever the lure of the mountains called and called, and I could not keep my mind on my books. But I could keep my mind on the perils I had passed. I could write of them, and I did write of them, almost every day. The Tale of the Tall Alcalde, Oregonian, Californian, With Walker in Nicaragua—I had lived all these and more; and they were now a part of my existence.... Meantime I was admitted to the bar. Then came the discovery of gold in Idaho, Montana, and so on, and I was off like a rocket with the rest.
To call Miller illiterate, as many, especially in printing offices which have handled his copy, have done, is hardly fair. His father, it must be remembered, was a schoolmaster with the Scotch reverence for serious books and for education, and the boy's early schooling was not neglected. To say, on the other hand, as many, including the poet himself, have said, that he received a college education, is also to speak without knowledge. He did complete a course in Columbia University, Eugene, Oregon, in 1859, but it was an institution in no way connected with the present University of Oregon. It was, rather, a mission school maintained by the Methodist Church South, and, according to Professor Herbert C. Howe of the University of Oregon, "its instruction was, at its utmost stretch, not enough to carry its pupils through the first half of a high school course, and most of its pupils were of grammar grade." It was closed suddenly early in the Civil-War period because of the active Southern sympathies of its president, who was himself very nearly the whole "university." It is significant that at almost the same time the Eugene Democratic Register edited by Miller was suppressed for alleged disloyalty to the Union.
For a period the poet undoubtedly did apply himself with diligence to books. Of his fellow students at Eugene he has recorded, "I have never since found such determined students and omnivorous readers. We had all the books and none of the follies of the great centers." The mania for writing had seized him early. Assisted by his father, he had recorded the events of his trip across the plains in a journal afterwards burned with his parental home in Oregon. "The first thing of mine in print was the valedictory class poem, 'Columbia College.'" Undoubtedly during this period he read widely and eagerly. "My two brothers and my sister were by my side, our home with our parents, and we lived entirely to ourselves, and really often made ourselves ill from too much study. We were all school teachers when not at college."
Living away from the centers of culture, with books as exotic things that came from without, almost as from another world, Miller, like many another isolated soul, grew to maturity with the feeling that something holy lay about the creation of literature and that authors, especially poets, were beings apart from the rest of men. Poetry became to him more than an art: it became a religion. "Poetry," he declared in his first London preface, "is with me a passion which defies reason." It was an honest declaration. During the sixties as express messenger in the Idaho gold fields, as newspaper editor, and judge, he wrote verse continually—"I lived among the stars"—but he preserved of all he wrote only a few rather colorless pieces which he published in 1868 with the title Specimens. The next year he issued at Portland, Oregon, Joaquin et al, a book of one hundred and twenty-four pages. It was his salute to the literary world. He addressed it "To the Bards of San Francisco Bay," and his address sheds light upon the timid young poet:
I am as one unlearned, uncouth,
From country come to join the youth
Of some sweet town in quest of truth,
A skilless Northern Nazarine,
From whence no good can ever come.
I stand apart as one that's dumb:
I hope, I fear, I hasten home,
I plunge into my wilds again.
He followed his book down to what was to him the glorious city of art and of soul that would welcome him with rapture, for was he too not a bard? Says Charles W. Stoddard, "Never had a breezier bit of human nature dawned upon me this side of the South Seas than that poet of the Sierra when he came to San Francisco in 1870."[62]
But the great Western city, as did New York a few months later, went on totally unaware of his advent. The bards even of San Francisco Bay did not come to the borders of the town to welcome the new genius. They seemed unaware of his presence. Harte was inclined to be sarcastic, but finally allowed the Overland Monthly to say a word of faint praise for the young poet, despite what it termed his "pawing and curvetting." "His passion," it declared in a review written probably by Ina Coolbrith, "is truthful and his figures flow rather from his perception than his sentiment." But that was all. He considered himself persecuted. His associates in the law had made fun of the legal term in the title of his book, had hailed him as "Joaquin" Miller, and had treated him as a joke. "I was so unpopular that when I asked a place on the Supreme Bench at the Convention, I was derisively told: 'Better stick to poetry.' Three months later, September 1, 1870, I was kneeling at the grave of Burns. I really expected to die there in the land of my fathers." He would support himself as Irving had supported himself with his pen. He sought cheap quarters in the great city and began to write. February 1, 1871, he recorded in his diary: "I have nearly given up this journal to get out a book. I wanted to publish a great drama called 'Oregonian,' but finally wrote an easy-going little thing which I called 'Arazonian,' and put the two together and called the little book Pacific Poems. It has been ready for the printer a long time."
He took the manuscript from publisher to publisher until, as he declares, every house in London had rejected it. His reception by Murray shows the general estimate of poetry by London publishers in the early seventies:
He held his head to one side, flipped the leaves, looked in, jerked his head back, looked in again, twisted his head like a giraffe, and then lifted his long finger:
"Aye, now, don't you know poetry won't do? Poetry won't do, don't you know?"
"But will you not read it, please?"
"No, no, no. No use, no use, don't you know?"
Then in desperation he printed a part of it at his own expense under the title Pacific Poems and sent out copies broadcast to the press. Never was venture so unpromising crowned with results so startling. The little book was hailed everywhere as something remarkable. The St. James Gazette declared that the poem "Arazonian"—that was Miller's early spelling of the word—was by Browning. The new author was traced to his miserable lodgings and made a lion of, and before the year was over the whole original manuscript of Pacific Poems had been brought out in a beautiful edition with the title Songs of the Sierras. Its author's real name did not appear upon the title page. The poems were by "Joaquin Miller," a name destined completely to supersede the more legal patronymic. "The third poem in my first London book," he explains, "was called 'California,' but it was called 'Joaquin' in the Oregon book. And it was from this that I was, in derision, called 'Joaquin.' I kept the name and the poem, too, till both were at least respected."[63]