Joaquin Miller - Critical Response and Reputation

Critical Response and Reputation

Miller was championed, although not enthusiastically, by Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce. Bierce, who once called Miller "the greatest-hearted man I ever knew" also is quoted as saying that he was "the greatest liar this country ever produced. He cannot, or will not, tell the truth." Miller's response was, "I always wondered why God made Bierce."

Called the Poet of the Sierras and the Byron of the Rockies, he may have been more of a celebrity in England than in his native U.S. Much of his reputation, however, came not from his poetry but from the image he created for himself by capitalizing on the stereotypical image of Western frontiersmen. As poet Bayard Taylor bitterly noted in 1876, British audiences "place the simulated savagery of Joaquin Miller beside the pure and serene muse of Longfellow." Critics made much of Miller's poor spelling and rhymes; he once rhymed "Goethe" and "teeth". Henry Cuyler Bunner satirized the error in a poem titled "Shake, Mulleary, and Go-ethe". Miller himself once admitted, "I'm damned if I could tell the difference between a hexameter and a pentameter to save my scalp."

The Westminster Review referred to Miller's poetry as "Whitman without the coarseness". For a time, Miller's poem "Columbus" was one of the most widely known American poems, memorized and recited by legions of schoolchildren. Miller is remembered today, among other reasons, for lines from his poem in honor of "Burns and Byron":

In men whom men condemn as ill

I find so much of goodness still.

In men whom men pronounce divine

I find so much of sin and blot

I do not dare to draw a line

Between the two, where God has not.