Joaquin Miller to Walt Whitman, 8 March 1890
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Okland Cal.
March 8 .90
My dear dear [illegible].
I was so sorry you did not find your high plane of work fruitful: but the hights are often most barren. The air is good in the haze: all the company select, if not numerous.
And now you are ill! May the gods hold you [illegible] and bring you
safe and solid back to
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the lone big land of Columbus.
I am today sending back proof sheets of my new book "To the Czar."1 I hope to tear his bowels out. Damn him!!
With love to you and yours. Joaquin
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Correspondent:
Joaquin Miller was the pen name of
Cincinnatus Heine Miller (1837–1913), an American poet nicknamed "Byron of
the Rockies" and "Poet of the Sierras." In 1871, the Westminster Review described Miller as "leaving out the coarseness
which marked Walt Whitman's poetry" (297). In an entry in his journal dated August 1,
1871, the naturalist John Burroughs recorded Whitman's fondness for Miller's
poetry; see Clara Barrus, Whitman and
Burroughs—Comrades (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1931), 60.
Whitman met Miller for the first time in 1872; he wrote of a visit with Miller
in a July 19, 1872, letter to his former publisher and
fellow clerk Charles W. Eldridge.
Notes
- 1. Miller published his poem "To the Czar" in the early 1890s, in honor of Sophia Perovskaya (1853–1881), who was executed for helping orchestrate the assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia. [back]