worked over and shorn of its more grotesque features, the poem reappeared in dignified form as Light, with the interesting prefatory avowal: "My aspiration is and ever has been, in my dim and uncertain way, to be a sort of Columbus—or Cortez." (In the collective edition the title is changed once more to A Song of Creation.)
When Miller finally reviewed his own work and prepared his collective edition, he saw that much of his verse had been hastily written, journalistic, prolix, lacking in form and concentration; and he manfully discarded many long passages of it. At the same time, he felt as never before the importance of his own position in American poetry. He had not really achieved a distinctive poetical style. He had not been a thinker. He had been a pathfinder of the imagination; like Whitman, he had blazed a way into new territories. He had brought something of undiscovered beauty and splendor into American literature. He exulted in the wide lands and seas which he first had annexed to the provinces of song. He had sung the exodus across the plains. He had pictured the great American desert. He had celebrated the forested heights of the Sierras, the giant trees of the Mariposa Grove, and the falls of the Yosemite. He had been a myth-maker and had sown with poetic legends all his western land from the snowy peaks of Mt. Rainier and Mt. Shasta through the golden poppy fields of the central valleys to San Diego Bay, Nicaragua, and the
