TO THE HOUSE OF THE SUN (epic poem)
628pp / 978-0979870743
“To the House of the Sun is a literary phenomenon on a scale with the Iliad or the Odyssey.” —Midwest Book Review
To the House of the Sun, a long narrative poem in thirty-three books, culminates with a young man’s experience of illumination in the summer of 1865, ascending into the air above California. It begins a few years earlier on a beach in Savannah, as he broods over the death of his fiancée and the war just beginning to tear the United States apart.
In between, we journey with him through a panorama of America at war: from Georgia through the Deep South, he meets escaped and freed slaves, families facing hardship, and soldiers from the recent battles. In the North, he befriends a weary Walt Whitman, and together they tend to the wounded in Washington before he leaves the poet and briefly joins the Union Army. After this he walks West, shedding any identity he may have once had—as an immigrant Irishman, a Catholic, a Southerner, a son—so that what began as an epic of history slowly becomes the hagiography of some strange man who appears in the West teaching, healing, and even raising the dead.
More than a decade in the writing, To the House of the Sun is consciously dependent upon the sacred literature and poetry our own culture is heir to. Following the poem is a generous selection of notes detailing these borrowings, which itself constitutes an anthology of sacred literature and folklore. Built as it is upon the great inherited tradition of history and religion, in the end the entirety of the poem becomes one of those very stories itself, a song of suffering and love, and finally of empathy.
“An impressive and monumental work.” —Ronald Schuchard, General Editor, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot
“An incredibly well executed epic saga in a poetry format, To The House of the Sun is complex, with manifold characters, plot developments, and internal rhythms. Simply stated, To the House of the Sun is a literary phenomenon on a scale with the Iliad or the Odyssey.” —Midwest Book Review
“To the House of the Sun ranks among both the most curious and the most ambitious literary products… The 360-page epic poem set during the Civil War is both strikingly original and, by author Miller’s enthusiastic acknowledgement, grandly derivative…The language is lush, sometimes metaphysical, in free but incantatory verse… A key distinction of this fat and fascinating paperback is that its final 260 pages are all appendices and footnotes in which Miller obsessively documents the sources and inspirations he drew upon for ideas, images and phrases in his text, from the epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible to Irish folklore, Civil War diaries and the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Yet while To the House of the Sun is quite accessible, and wholly its own work, it is dense and sophisticated enough to be worthy of its copious source materials.” —Pittsburgh City Paper
“A book like this is absolutely unprecedented in our time… There is an exquisite, terrible and very human beauty woven throughout all its pages. We walk with Orpheus, with Odysseus, with Dante in the Inferno of soul-immolating tragedy, in the immortal search for spiritual meaning in world that often drifts toward nightmare—yet the poetry, the paradoxical seal of immortality redeems us all. This is a redemptive book. Read it thoroughly and well, and your life will be ennobled and enriched.” —Stephen Larsen, author of A Fire in the Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell
“…massive [in] scope… As Conrad continues wandering across the whole of the continent, he first encounters the divine, then absorbs it so fully that he radiates it—like the biblical Moses whose face shone in blinding fashion after a mountain-top conversation with God. Once this transformation takes place, Miller’s language transforms as well into a driving expository force… To the House of the Sun will take you on a journey from the south to the west, from the sea to the sky, all the while peeling flesh off spirit until all that’s left is the echo of one man’s imagination.” —Small Press Book Review