18 pages • 36 minutes read
Joaquin MillerColumbus
Nonfiction | Poem | Middle Grade | Published in 1900A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context
Much like Columbus and his voyages of discovery, there is a strong element of myth-making in the life and personality of Joaquin Miller. Miller’s life was full of adventure (and misadventures), and included much traveling—especially in the American Wild West. Although now known as a poet, Miller held a variety of occupations during his life, and represented himself in his autobiographical writings as a restless drifter forever in search of something new. Miller claimed to have lived amongst a Native American tribe for a year, to have participated in the California Gold Rush, and to have gone abroad to England for some travels in 1870. His recorded antics reveal that he sometimes flip-flopped between being on the wrong and right side of the law: He got into legal trouble because of accusations of theft, but later in life was (supposedly) a lawyer and a judge.
Biographical accounts of Miller agree it is difficult to know what is fact and what is fiction in the accounts of Miller’s life. Regardless of what the truth may be, Miller was variously known as “Poet of the Sierras” and “Byron of the Rockies” due to his persona as a frontiersman; it is this fact that is the most illuminating in light of “Columbus” as a literary work. Miller’s eagerness to idealize Columbus and his voyage may be a reflection of his own desire to be seen by his contemporaries as a fearless explorer of the “Wild West,” and his sentimentalization of Columbus’s voyage is in keeping with the romanticizing tendencies he displayed in his body of work as a whole.
Historical & Cultural Context
According to the American scholar Anita G. Gorman, Joaquin Miller wrote “Columbus” in 1892 for the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the New World. As Gorman explains, Miller was not alone in indulging in a poetic reimagining of the voyage and what it symbolized for the Europeans and Americans of his day, as other poets of the time also wrote poems on a similar theme (see Further Reading & Resources for more information). Columbus was an especially evocative figure in the 19th century, as the 19th century—just like Columbus’ 15th century—was also a time of major imperial discovery and expansion for the European superpowers. Furthermore, the idea of the Wild West and discovering new frontiers was still of crucial importance within the United States, as the nation attempts to expand its national power and influence in the 21st century.
The idealization of Columbus that frequently took place at a cultural level was, therefore, a reflection of the jingoistic and imperialistic mood current in both Europe and North America at the time. For Miller and many of his contemporaries, Columbus was not only important as a historical figure, but also—as Miller’s poem demonstrates—valuable for holding a certain kind of aspirational quality for the European explorers and imperialists of Miller’s time. In turn, Miller’s poem became popular as part of the literary curriculum in American schools, with students encouraged to learn and recite the poem. The poem is thus representative of some of the historical and cultural values in circulation at the time of his writing.
