Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/71

Western Dialect Poets 53 it was merely a phase in national development, and the voice of that phase is not the voice of the nation itself. The immigrant character of the Far West is illustrated by- its chief writers, Harte, Miller, and Sill. Bret Harte, bom in Albany, never became quite saturated with the spirit of the West, and spent a little more than half of his total years in the State of New York and in Great Britain. His poetry is that of a gifted man of letters who perceived the literary possibilities of the material lying about him in his impressionable young manhood in California. The picturesque California of the early fifties he presented adroitly not only in his short stories but also in such poems as Plain Language from Truthful James (generally known as The Heathen Chinee) , The Society upon the Stanislaus, Dickens in Camp, and Jim. Some of these poems were dramatic monologues, commonly in dialect; Harte's poems in conventional English were less successful, though some of his Spanish Idyls and Legends depict attractively the fading glory of Spanish rule in the West. Most of his poems contain humour and pathos, often blended, as in the short stories; in most of them the deft technique, especially the sur- prising turn at the end, adds much to the reader's pleasure. His range was considerable but his excellence nowhere great enough to lift him above the minor poets. ' Harte's East and West Poems, which came out in 1871, exploited "the Pike, " a recurrent figure in our literature since the work of George W. Harris^ and other Southerners. The Pike County Ballads of John Hay (1838-1905), published in the same year, reached an extensive audience, English as well as American ; to the English reviews, indeed. Hay was likely to be the poet of Jim Bludso and Little Breeches rather than one of the authors of a monumental life of Lincoln.' Since 1871 dialect poems portraying humble life in a definite region have contri- buted a striking localism to our minor poetry. Possibly the truest representative of the Far West in the poetry of the nineteenth century is Joaquin Miller (1841-1913). Like Whitman, whom he resembles in more ways than one, Miller won a following first of all in England, ever watchful for ' For Harte's stories see Book III, Chap. vi. " See Book II, Chap. xix. 3 See Book III, Chap. xv.