Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/72

 54 Later Poets signs of the indigenous in American literature and finding them in Miller's poetry as in his leonine mane, flannel shirt, and high boots. In 1870-71 the "Oregon Byron," then in London, achieved a popularity as sudden as that of his master. Songs of the Sierras, first published many thousand miles from the Sierras themselves, was widely applauded, and Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Rossetti received this "typical American" author as a brother bard. Then America, too, discovered him, and he was soon known from London to San Francisco. Al- though his debt to B3nron, Coleridge, and other romanticists is obvious to any reader, his verse is by no means purely imitative. If his subject matter had been less novel, it is hard to say what his poetry would have been ; certainly we may say that it owes at least as much to its novelty of theme as to its essential quali- ties. The element of imitation, plain as it is, is superficial; his poetry may best be regarded, as Miller regarded it himself, as indirect autobiography, as the extraordinary product of an extraordinary life. "My cradle, " he wrote in a lively prose account of his life, "was a covered wagon, pointed West." In this wagon he was born, he tells us, as it was crossing the border line of Indiana and Ohio, in the year 1841, and he was named Cincinnatus Hiner Miller. His family settled on the Middle Western fron- tier, where they suffered many hardships without becoming dispirited. Fascinated, however, by accounts of the Far West, the family began, in March, 1852, a three-thousand-mile jour- ney to Oregon, lasting more than seven months, beset by cholera, tornadoes, and hostile Indians. Thus as a boy of eleven Joaquin Miller came to know that terrible and alluring westward journey to the ultimate frontier. After only two years on the Oregon farm, he began a roving life of adventure that led him into half a dozen Indian campaigns, and into repeated struggles with mountain flood and prairie fire, desert thirst and buffalo stampede, until he understood the life of that region outwardly, perhaps inwardly too, as nobody else in American literature. In the course of this life bristUng with action he found time to write verse constantly, publishing, first. Specimens in 1868; a year later Joaquin et al, whence his rechristening derisively as "Joaquin Miller"; and another year later, at his own expense, in London, Pacific Poems, which had an astonishing reception