In Henry Miller (1963) Kingsley Widmer calls Miller a ‘compatriot of Emerson and Whitman’ and ‘a twentieth-century urban Thoreau’. It is also here that he coins the now famous moniker for Miller, the ‘rebel-buffoon’. However, as mentioned in the Introduction, this type of labelling only takes intertextuality in Miller's work as far as any biographical analysis can. Widmer's focus is Miller's personal affinities, as seemingly manifest in his texts, with these ancestral authors, without really addressing the complexity of form in Miller's work. In ‘The Legacy of Henry Miller’ (1963) from Three Decades of Criticism (1971), Widmer sums up his critique as follows: ‘In short, Miller's American ordinariness does qualify him from the extreme explorers of sensibility; he is a buffoonish version of the great tradition.’ Widmer does not paint a very positive picture of Miller's talents, because he bases his judgement on Miller's ability (or lack thereof) to partake in an unspoken tradition. Yet, Miller's complexity of form is also at the heart of this network of Romantic affinities, and any critique of it demands moving beyond basic tradition-oriented comparisons.