Miller in Italy: Lake Como
I’m walkin’ with Joaquin this month in Italy, where he spent many months in the mid-1870s after establishing himself in London. As I ride trains from place to place, I’m reading his Complete Poetical Works , which he put together in The Hights in 1897, and pulling out tidbits and advice for writers. Miller not only collected his poems (the ones he would stand by, he wrote; the rest were reactions to his times, ruined by critics), he talks about them—about where he wrote them and what they meant to him. They’re beautiful. With the rhythm of the rails, I sound out the meter in my head, my fingers correcting the paragraph breaks where the archived text has clumped things wrong. Miller's writing is incredibly lyrical, and whatever reputation he had for gaining fame before he fully developed his craft, he certainly mastered it with the help of his masters, whom he sought in libraries and museums in his European travels. Robert Browning invited him to Venice, where Miller wrote some ...