A Forgotten American Poet

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman was born in Boston on February 4, 1821. He was educated at Bishop Hopkin's school in Burlington, and then at Harvard, although trouble with his sight forced him to drop out. Although he later entered and graduated from law school, his career - supported by the inheritance of his businessman father - focused on his favourite studies: literature, botany and astronomy. In all three fields he achieved some minor success, publishing his observations of astronomical and meteorological phenomena, recognised as an authority on the Flora of Franklin county and publishing poems in the Living Age, Putam's and Atlantic magazines. These were collected and printed privately, and published in Boston and London.

Although publicly anonymous, Tuckerman was not unknown to his literary peers. In 1851 and 1854, Tuckerman met Alfred Tennyson, staying as his guest and cultivating a long-standing and sincere friendship. Unfortunately, Tennyson's views of Tuckerman's poetry are not known. However, those of Emerson, Hawthorn, Longfellow, Bryant - to whom he sent complementary copies of his verse - are available. All expressed their strong liking for the verse: Hawthorne thought it a "remarkable" volume whose "merit does not lie upon the surface, but must be looked for with faith and sympathy"; Emerson thought "Rhotundra" a "perfect success in its kind," and urged him to publish it in the Atlantic, which Tukerman subsequently did; Longfellow gave his opinion as "very favourable," although like Hawthorne he noted that the intrinsic merit of his work did not automatically mean that the challenging work would be publicly successful in the immediate term.

Oddly, having gained the respect of the foremost writers of his day, Tuckerman's publication of his Poems in 1860 was the point in his career at which he retired from public literary circles. Returning to seclusion, he continued to write (very well), but by the time he wrote his last sonnet in 1872, he was obsolete. He died the following year.

He was reclaimed from obscurity by the efforts of Walter Prichard Eaton, in an essay in the January issue of Forum, 1909. From this article, Witter Bynner corresponded with the poet's granddaughter, discovering the unpublished poems which were in her keeping. In 1931, he published his edition of Tuckerman's sonnets. The Complete Poems was edited by N. Scott Momaday in 1965.

With the growing interest in the relationship between science and literature, the peculiar interests and mathematical methods of this poet who kept a log of the rhyme schemes of his sonnets, ensuring no one followed the same pattern as another, may cause Tuckerman to come increasingly onto the critical radar.

The Father of American Poetry?

For someone now popularly revered as the first true poet in the American language, arguably as important to American letters as the founding fathers were to the political shape of the United States, Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892) provoked ambiguous endorsements from critics of his time.

A contemporary reviewer, Peter Bayne, complained of his works:

They are neither in rhyme not in any measure known as blank verse; and they are emitted in spurts and gushes of unequal length, which can only by courtesy be called lines. Neither in form nor in substance are they poetry...

It is understandable why his style came as a shock to the system. With his long, rolling lines (which have the cadence of Biblical writing) which demand to be read and absorbed as much as comprehended, streams of personal thoughts, often erotic and sensual, merging with philosophical or political ideas, Whitman seems a remarkably modern writer. Not only this, but he also seems excessively egocentric, and it is only natural to want to react strongly against this man who reviewed his own poems anonymously in the Democratic Review, heralding them with the claim, "An American poet at last!".

However, Whitman's experimentation in verse centred around the self is precisely why he has become seen as the father of modern American poetry. For Whitman, "the topmost proof of a race is in its poetry", and the advanced and imaginative use of language was the key definition of the quality of the nation and society which produced the writer. Whitman's aim was to cast aside the residue of European styles which had up to this point been an intrinsic element of American poetry, breaking new formal ground to match the new political ground of the United States.

The artistic use of words in Whitman's eyes was more than mere verbal craftsmanship. For him, poetry should always be spontaneous and, rather than being an artisan in full control of his creation, the poet ought to be seen as an inspired genius, able to absorb, accumulate and translate the sensations of his environment into words: "I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,/And accrue what I hear into myself...and let sounds contribute towards me" (Leaves of Grass, ll.584-585). Language was more than a practical communicative act, instead becoming the essence of what it means to be and to feel both a single, conscious human and part of a wider social, racial and religious structure; as he affirmed in his Primer, "All words are spiritual - nothing is more spiritual than words". For Whitman, there is a chain of influence, from race to the poetry which defines that race, from poetry to language and from language to spirituality, with the current link throughout being the poet himself. This ideology explains to some extent the egocentric I of Whitman's verse: by setting out his stall so explicitly in Leaves of Grass, Whitman was effectively inviting the reader to measure him as the coincidentally chosen equivalent for the achievement of the new, unified American national identity.

In spite of this, it would be wrong to view Whitman as a single, dominant, Adam-like figure, in whose mould all future American poets are invariably and inevitably cast. For example, America was, for Whitman, a "nation of nations" yet a century later Langston Hughes would be declaring that the coloured 'I' too needed to sing of itself, implying (rightly) that the black voice had been neglected, never thrown democratically and equally into the linguistic melting-pot. Likewise, patriotically to claim Whitman as the quintessential American poet is to, implicitly, isolate him from the international context in which he became something of a cult figure, particularly for the French poets of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Words Worth?

Sorry about the dreadful pun, but I thought I'd plug a piece of software I have been using since I bought my new computer (from the first-rate thePCman Computers).

Rather than packing my clean, new hard drive full of Microsoft Office, I have gone for the free option of Openoffice. I started with version 1.1.4 of their suite, which includes the same functions as MS Office (excluding the database). Concentrating on the word processor, I found it difficult to get the hang of the functions, most of which are labelled differently to MS standards; importing documents was less than flawless (especially with bullet points and tables); it lacks that desperately needed (and feared) tool of the essay-writer, the word count; and it seemed (even on my new speed machine) slightly on the slow side.

I was just about to read for my trusty MS Office disk, when I thought I'd give the new Version 2.0 a shot, something I had avoided the first time of looking as it is still in the Beta stage. And am I glad I did! Suddenly, everything looks and runs as smoothly as its expensive big brother. Functions are labelled and located where I expect to find them; importing between formats is seamless (indeed, I still use the MS formats for the documents, to ensure compatability); and the word count has made its entry. In short, the MS Office CD is in the bin for good, and with the final version ready to roll from the website any time soon, Microsoft Office is finally not worth it.

House and Home

Edmund Wilson heralded Edith Wharton (1862-1937) as "Not only one of the great pioneers, but also the poet, of interior decoration". In great detail, Wharton's fiction describes the habitats of that breed of middle-class, urban Americans at the end of the nineteenth century. Here is an extract from The House of Mirth (1905):

He ushered her into a slip of a hall hung with old prints. She noticed the letters and notes heaped on the table among his gloves and sticks; then she found herself in a small library, dark but cheerful, with its walls of books, a pleasantly faded Turkey rug, a littered desk and, as he had foretold, a tea-tray on a low table near the window. A breeze had sprung up, swaying inward the muslin curtains, and bringing a fresh scent of mignonette and petunias from the flower-box on the balcony.

Wharton's creation of the details of domesticity is more than simply an exercise in description and design. One of Wharton's consistent themes is the way in which physical space is a powerful metaphor for psychological freedom. In Ethan Frome, a remarkable novella, the tragic Ethan sees "in the diminished dwelling the image of his own shrunken body"; Lily Bart, the heroine of The House of Mirth is either shut-in or shut-out of the houses of aristocratic America, and is forced to become a chameleon-like figure, constantly adapting (most famously in the novel's tableau vivant scene) to her surroundings without ever feeling firmly located; for Lydia in the short story "Soul's Belated," marriage is a physical convention, designed "to keep people away from each other."

If Wharton was the poet of the interior, then her contemporary Willa Cather (1873 - 1947) must make a strong claim to be the literary artist of the outdoors. As Cather wrote, "When I strike the open plains, something happens. I'm home. I breathe differently. That love of great spaces, of rolling open country like the sea - it's the grand passion of her life." Whereas Wharton's characters shuttle between the elaborately showy sets of classy America, Cather's fictions dramatise the experience of the pioneers on the frontier, in their struggle to lay down roots, secure ownership of a plot of land on which they may sustain themselves and their inheritors, build their own domestic space. Yet her immigrants never feel a sense of utter homelessness, even though many of them (Russian, German, Irish) are a thousand miles displaced. The current of the oral tradition, of stories of people in their homeland, of circling myths, rebinds them continually back to the land of their ancestors, even as in this new space they lo new space they look forward to their new future.

So, the comparison between Cather and Wharton serves very well to emphasise the truth of the old adage: that one may have a comfortable domestic environment, without ever feeling a sense of secure settlement, or be a nomad living a hesitant existence on the fringes of comfort, yet feel the indelible attachment to that invisible place miles away, which still anchors one to a sense of home.