Joaquin Miller Biography | Poet

Joaquin Miller was born Cincinnatus Heine Miller in 1841 to immigrant parents. He writes, "My cradle was a covered wagon, pointed west. I was born in a covered wagon, I am told, at or about the time it crossed the line dividing Indiana from Ohio." When Miller was 12, his family left the mid-West brandishing "two big heavily laden wagons, with eight yoke of oxen to each, a carriage and two horses for mother and baby sister, and a single horse for the three boys to ride." The distance covered in their cross-country journey, by way of Oregon, was nearly 3000 miles. The time consumed, he records, "was seven months and five days. There were no bridges, no railroad levels, nothing of the sort.... Many times, at night, after ascending a stream to find a ford, we could look back and see our smoldering camp-fires of the day before." This journey made a lasting impression on the boy's impressionable mind; this tortuous wandering gave Miller his reverence for the spaciousness and glory of the West in general and the pioneer in particular. After two years in the Oregon home, he ran away to find gold.

At fifteen, Miller lived with Native Americans as one of them. In 1859 (at the age of eighteen), he attends a mission school "college" in Eugene, Oregon. Between 1860 and 1865, he is an express messenger, editor of a pacifist newspaper that is suppressed for opposing the Civil War, lawyer, and, occasionally, a poet. He held a minor judgeship from 1866 to 1870.

His first book Specimens was published in 1868. His second book, Joaquin et al., from which he took his name, appeared in 1869. These publications receive little attention, not even from "the bards of San Francisco Bay," to whom he had dedicated the latter volume. He was discouraged and angry. He resolves to quit America to go to the land that has always been the nursing ground of poets. "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 lands in London, anonymous and unknown. He submits his manuscripts to one publisher after another, each time without success. Finally, in desperation, he prints a hundred copies of his book "Pacific Poems" and sends them out for review. The buzz is explosive, and it birthed one of the most dramatic reversals of fortune in all of literature. He became famous overnight. He is fêted, lauded, lionized, ranked as an equal of Robert Browning, given a dinner by the Pre-Raphaelites, and acclaimed as "the great interpreter of America," "the Bryon of Oregon"!

His fantastic success in England is easily explained. In London, he brought the uniqueness of the prairie breath. The more he exaggerated his persona, the louder he roared, the more the English liked it. He strode into Victorian drawing rooms while wearing his velvet jacket, hip boots, and flowing hair. As the childhood images of a "wild and woolly Westerner" came to life in the English minds, the more he was awarded. The grandeur of his work was praised as "typically American."

And yet, for all his overstressed Western masculinity, Miller lacks creative energy. His exuberance and whipped-up rhetoric cannot disguise the essential weakness of his verse. Despite a certain breeziness and a few magnificent descriptions of cañons and mountain chains, it is feeble and false, full of cheap heroics, atrocious taste, and impossible men and women. One or two poems, like "Crossing the Plains" and parts of his apostrophes to the Sierras, the Pacific Ocean, and the Missouri River, may live; the rest seem doomed to a gradual extinction.

From 1872 to 1886, Miller traveled the Continent. In 1887, he returned to California, dwelling on the Heights and helping to found an experimental Greek academy for aspiring writers. He died there in 1913, after a picturesque life near the Golden Gate.