He would be the prophet of a new era. To the bards who are to come he flings out the challenge: "The Old World has been written, written fully and bravely and well.... Go forth in the sun, away into the wilds, or contentedly lay aside your aspirations of song. Now, mark you distinctly, I am not writing for nor of the poets of the Old World or the Atlantic seaboard. They have their work and their way of work. My notes are for the songless Alaskas, Canadas, Californias, the Aztec lands and the Argentines that patiently await their coming prophets."[68]
VI
The treatment of Miller by his own countrymen has never been so laudatory as that accorded him by other lands, notably England, but his complaint that his own people neglected him is groundless. All the leading magazines—the Atlantic, Scribner's, the Independent, and the rest—opened their columns to him freely. That reviews of his work and critical estimates of him generally were more caustic on this side the Atlantic came undoubtedly from the fact that the critic who was to review him approached his book always in a spirit of irritation at the British insistence that an American book to be worth the reading must be redolent of the wild and the uncouth, must deal with Indians, and buffaloes, and the various extremes of democracy. Miller has been the chief victim of this controversy—a controversy, indeed, which was waged through the whole period. The eccentricities of the man and his ignorance and his picturesque crudeness, set over against the extravagant claims of British writers, aroused prejudices that blinded the American critic to the poet's real worth.
On the whole the English have been right. Not that American literature to be of value must be shaggy and ignorant, a thing only of Pikes and slang and dialect. It means rather that the new period which opened in the seventies demanded genuineness, reality, things as they are, studies from life rather than studies from books; that it demanded not the reëchoing of outworn ideals and measures from other lands, but the spirit of America, of the new Western world, of the new soul of the new republic. And what poet has caught more of this fresh new America than the singer of the Sierras, the singer of the great American deserts, and the northern Yukon?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Joaquin Miller. (1841–1913.) Specimens, 1868; Joaquin et al, 1869; Pacific Poems, 1870; Songs of the Sierras, 1871; Songs of the Sunlands, 1873; Unwritten History: Life Amongst the Modocs (with Percival Mulford), 1874; The Ship in the Desert, 1875; First Families of the Sierras, 1875; Songs of the Desert, 1875; The One Fair Woman, 1876; The Baroness of New York, 1877; Songs of Italy, 1878; The Danites in the Sierras, 1881; Shadows of Shasta, 1881; Poems, Complete Edition, 1882; Forty-nine: a California Drama, 1882; '49: or, the Gold-seekers of the Sierras, 1884; Memorie and Rime, 1884; The Destruction of Gotham, 1886; Songs of the Mexican Seas, 1887; In Classic Shades and Other Poems, 1890; The Building of the City Beautiful, a Poetic Romance, 1893; Songs of the Soul, 1896; Chants for the Boer, 1900; True Bear Stories, 1900; As It Was in the Beginning, 1903; Light: a Narrative Poem, 1907; Joaquin Miller's Poetry, Bear Edition, 1909.
[CHAPTER VII]
THE TRANSITION POETS
The second generation of poets in America, those later singers born during the vital thirties in which had appeared the earliest books of the older school, began its work during the decade before the Civil War. It was not a group that had been launched, as were the earlier poets of the century, by a spiritual and moral cataclysm, or by a new strong tide in the national life. It was a school of deliberate art, the inevitable classical school which follows ever upon the heels of the creative epoch.