Compare the use of California and California life by Sill with use of the same material by Joaquin Miller or Bret Harte or Mark Twain.
Compare Sill’s “Hermitage” with Robert Frost’s “A Boy’s Will.” What is the likeness in the general drift of the two and what are the essential differences in the treatments of the theme?
Read W. B. Parker’s “Life of Sill” with especial reference to Sill’s letters and the degree to which they reveal his humor and his seriousness. Note poems which correspond in spirit or in content with given letters.
Compare the treatment of primitive Western life and adventure by Miller with use of the same material by Mark Twain or Bret Harte.
Read Miller for evidences of literary influence upon him of Scott or Byron or Coleridge or Browning.
Read Miller’s “Song of the South” and his explanatory remarks on it and compare Longfellow’s treatment of the Mississippi; or compare Masters’s preface to his volume “Toward the Gulf” and his poems on the same subject.
Note the insistence of Miller on the idea that life is power and in his later poems the increasing respect for reflection.
Compare Miller’s “Columbus” with Lowell’s “Columbus” and Lanier’s “Sonnets on Columbus.”