When one approaches the poetry of Joaquin Miller, one is at first confused by the lavishness of it, the strength, and then swiftly the dreary weakness of it. It is like his own landscapes, abounding in vast barrens and flats, with here and there glimpses of glittering peaks and vast ranges, and now and then oases full of marvelous revel of color and strange birds and tropic flowers. Three-fourths of all he wrote is lifeless and worthless, but the other quarter is to American poetry what the Rockies are to the American landscape. Few poets have so needed an editor with courage to reject and judgment to arrange. Miller himself has edited his poems with barbarous savageness. He has not hesitated to lop off entire cantos, to butcher out the whole trunk of a poem, leaving only straggling and unrelated branches, to add to work in his early manner stanzas after his later ideals, and to revamp and destroy and cast utterly away after a fashion that has few precedents. He has done the work with a broad-ax when a lancet was needed. His editings are valuable, indeed, only in the new prose matter that he has added as foot-note and introduction.
The key to Miller's poetry is an aphorism from his own pen: "We must, in some sort, live what we write if what we write is to live." The parts of his work that undoubtedly will live are those poems that deal most closely with the material from which he sprang and of which his early life was molded. He is the poet of the frontier and of the great mid-century exodus across the Plains. Poems like "The Heroes of Oregon," and "Exodus for Oregon," are a part of the national history. They thrill at every point with reality and life.
The Plains! the shouting drivers at the wheel; The crash of leather whips; the crush and roll Of wheels; the groan of yokes and grinding steel And iron chain, and lo! at last the whole Vast line, that reach'd as if to touch the goal, Began to stretch and stream away and wind Toward the west, as if with one control; Then hope loom'd fair, and home lay far behind; Before, the boundless plain, and fiercest of their kind.
Then dust arose, a long dim line like smoke From out of riven earth. The wheels went groaning by, Ten thousand feet in harness and in yoke, They tore the ways of ashen alkali, And desert winds blew sudden, swift and dry. The dust! it sat upon and fill'd the train! It seemed to fret and fill the very sky. Lo! dust upon the beasts, the tent, the plain, And dust, alas! on breasts that rose not up again.