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Poems
J.R. Miller’s works are interspersed by many short poems. So far I have been unable to identify any poem that he wrote himself. We know that he did write poetry because he contributed to Missionary Tidings, the official publication of the Christian Woman’s Board of Missions. Regrettably Dr. Miller is casual about crediting authorship, a heinous crime in today’s academic circles. Most of the poets whose works he quotes from are not named, some are only referred to by the pronominal epitaph one, which at least indicates that Miller himself did not write the poem. Some of the poems quoted were popular hymns. Hopefully, the hymnals gave appropriate credit to the author, because regrettably Miller did not. Noticeable examples of this are ‘The Rock of Ages’ written by Augustus M. Toplady and ‘Not worthy, Lord, to gather up the crumbs’ authored by Edward H. Bickersteth. In ‘Come Ye Apart’ (1890), the reading for August 16th has a poem beginning Hark, hark! a voice amid the quiet intense! This is an example of the more complex problem. The stanza occurs at the start of part II of ‘Within Without’ a very long dramatic poem that George MacDonald published in May of 1855. Miller quotes MacDonald without crediting MacDonald. It is doubtful that many of Miller’s readers would recognize the source. Without the increasing propensity of poetry lovers to publish their favourite works on the Web it would be very difficult to track down the author or the source, even so it will probably be impossible to identify every piece that Miller has used. In defence of Miller’s practices, it can be claimed that space was at a premium in all his books, especially in the daily devotionals. Come Ye Apart, probably Dr. Miller’s best known daily devotional, fails to credit even one author. A prime feature of this work is that there is one reading per day, and each reading fits on one page. Some of the pages in this book have the text realy badly scrunched up so it will all fit on the page. Initially the goal of this Website was just to publish James Miller’s books online. An expanded aim would be track down and provide a modicum of information about every person, picture, and poem that is mentioned in Miller’s books. In January 2005 work started on creating an index of first lines for each of Miller’s books. This was basically completed in February. It is now March and poetry has its own subdomain poets.JR-Miller.com. Over the coming months, all the poets that Miller mentions or whose poetry is quoted, will each merit a subdirectory with a pithy description of the author, a photo, and a listing of most important poems. This assumes that the poem or author can be identified, and the requisite data is available without running afoul of the copyright laws.
AuthorsTo-date only 50 authors have been identified. No doubt this will quadruple before the end of the year, and require more than one page to list them all. The intention is to give a pithy description of each author’s life and list most if not all of her works. Links, preferably local ones, will be given to the poems themselves.
First Lines of the Poetry Quotesused by J.R. Miller in his Books
Streams in the Desertby Mrs. Charles E. Cowman
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