The Complete Poetical Works of Joaquin Miller (Classic Reprint) [Paperback]

In looking over my notes at the end of this second edition, wherein I have tried to answer and even anticipate the eager questions of young poets, I find I may have said too much; given too mucli encouragement, too little caution. Let me qualify all I have set down in this book, by saying bluntly, that the poets trade is the hardest trade of all trades in the world ;his compensation is the poorest; his triumphs the fewest; not one in ten thousand can earn his bread at it. Sir Walter Besant is being laughed at for having advised that a man should secure a competence before writing books. But Sir Walter was right. And the novelist, as a rule, receives fifty dollars to the poets one. A nother thing to be taken into account before venturing up the stormy steeps of song, poets, like priests or preachers, are not in the line of preferment, either at the polls or at the White House. Suppose that James Whitcomb Riley should ask to be Governor, or I to be sent to the beautiful land of the Rising Sun !S ee? Yet we have managed our affairs fairly well, made fortune and fair name out of nothing, have practically made bricks without straw. Yet, while there is no more danger of our asking such preferment than there is of our receiving it, you see clearly that the poet must stand alone. A gain, the poet is, must be, as sensitive as a child, and his work wears and wears till his nerves are so threadbare that he dares not take up a newspaper lest he may see something ugly. Let me say again, frankly. Don ttry to be a poet if you can possibly help it. But if you must, you must; and there will always be plenty who must. My Notes are for those who must. But better be a first-rate plowman than a second-rate poet, so far as fortune, health, and content are concerned. AB urns, of course, can be first at both. Born a rover and a lover, I have wandered farther, perhaps, than any man
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)