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."