“Were I asked to define poetry, I would answer in a single word, Heart.” — Joaquin Miller | V2Melody

“Were I asked to define poetry, I would answer in a single word, Heart.”

Makes feeling the whole definition of the art · Prefatory notes on poetry

About Joaquin Miller

Joaquin Miller

8 September 1837–17 February 1913

Joaquin Miller, born Cincinnatus Hiner Miller on September 8, 1837, and dead on February 17, 1913, lived a life that seemed designed to invite legend. He was a poet, journalist, lawyer, teacher, dramatist, lecturer, rancher, and relentless self-inventor. To admirers in the nineteenth century, he was the “Poet of the…

More by Joaquin Miller

Poems by Joaquin Miller

More remarks by Joaquin Miller

“I always wondered why God made Bierce.”

Dry retort after Bierce had publicly doubted his truthfulness · Conversation, reply to Ambrose Bierce

“Give a man five years, and, with unfortunate exceptions of course, he will find his level on the Pacific, and his place, whether high or low, as naturally as a stream of water.”

Sees the West as a force that sorts character without ceremony · Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History

“There never was a poet and there never will be a poet who disputed God, or so degraded himself as to doubt his eternal existence.”

Treats belief in God as inseparable from the poetic vocation · Advice to a young writer