Читать книгу A History of American Literature Since 1870 - Fred Lewis Pattee - Страница 49

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The work of Harte and even of Hay is the work of an onlooker rather than a sharer. One feels that both were studying their picturesque surroundings objectively for the sake of "copy"; but Joaquin Miller, like Mark Twain, may be said to have emerged from the materials he worked in. He could write in his later years, "My poems are literally my autobiography." "If you care to read further of my life, making allowance for poetic license, you will find these [poems] literally true." In some ways he is a more significant figure than either Harte or Hay. No American writer, not even Thoreau or Whitman, has ever been more uniquely individual, and none, not even Mark Twain, has woven into his writings more things that are peculiarly American, or has worked with a more thorough first-hand knowledge of the picturesque elements that went into the making of the new West. He is the poet of the American westward march, the poet of "the great American desert," the poet preëminently of the mountain ranges from Alaska to Nicaragua as John Muir is their prose interpreter.