Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

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Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (born February 4, 1821 in Boston ; died May 9, 1873 there ) was an American poet.

Life

Engraved portrait of F. G. Tuckerman as a young man

He was born to a wealthy Boston family; the botanist Edward Tuckerman was his brother; the writer and art critic Henry Theodore Tuckerman was a cousin. In 1837 he began studying at Harvard University , but soon dropped out and switched to Harvard Law School ; In 1845 he received his license to practice medicine. After his marriage to Hannah Lucinda Jones in 1847, he gave up the legal profession, moved into his wife's house in Greenfield , lived on inherited wealth and pursued his academic hobby-horses such as botany and astronomy. In the 1850s he began to publish poetry in various popular magazines such as The Continental Monthly and the Atlantic Monthly . The work of Alfred Tennyson , whom he visited in England in 1855 and with whom he exchanged letters in the following years, was of great influence on his poetic work ; he also corresponded with Longfellow , Emerson and Hawthorne, among others .

In 1857 his wife died giving birth to their third child. Tuckerman expressed his grief in a few poems; In general, all of his late works are characterized by melancholy and partly by despair. In 1860 his first and only volume of poetry was published in Boston. Tuckerman wrote mainly sonnets ; in later work editions they are usually arranged in five cycles. While he was relatively unknown during his lifetime, he was completely forgotten after his death and was only "rediscovered" in the 20th century - a fate he shared with two contemporaries who also lived in seclusion and wrote poetry in Massachusetts, namely Emily Dickinson and Jones Very .

plant

Tuckerman's rediscovery is primarily due to Witter Bynner , who had Tuckerman's sonnets reprinted in 1931, and to the poet and critic Yvor Winters , who named Tuckerman's work The Cricket as probably the best poem in English of the 19th century. Since then, Tuckerman has had a permanent, if not central, place in the canon of American literature and is often anthologized. Penguin Books published in 2003 a collection of poems by three American poets of the 19th century under the title Three American Poets ; Tuckerman was placed here alongside Herman Melville and Edwin Arlington Robinson .

Like many poems of American Romanticism, Tuckerman's sonnets are often about nature. Unlike for the transcendentalists , especially Emerson, for Tuckerman the forests of New England are not a place of consolation and union with nature; rather, his poems express man's inability to “read” nature, a doubt about the meaningfulness of the world. It was this doubt, and the resulting desperation, that Winters highlighted in his review of The Cricket . Primarily, this ode to a cricket is in the tradition of English romanticism - especially John Keats's famous Ode to a Nightingale echoes . Here, however, nature does not evoke grandeur, but fear of death; According to Winters - like Melville's White Whale  - the inexplicability of the sung about becomes a timeless symbol for the “darkness of nature”. The cricket is also remarkable in formal terms; it is the only poem by Tuckerman that is not subject to a metrical formalism, but is written like Walt Whitman's poetry in free verse , which would later shape the poetry of the 20th century.

literature

Work editions

  • Witter Bynner (Ed.): The Sonnets of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman . Alfred A. Knopf, New York / London 1931.
  • N. Scott Momaday (Ed.): The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman . Oxford University Press, New York 1965.
  • Jonathan Bean (Ed.): Three American Poets . Penguin, London 2003, ISBN 978-0-14-043686-0 .

Secondary literature

  • Eugene England: Beyond Romanticism: Tuckerman's Life and Poetry . State University of New York Press, 1991.
  • Samuel A. Golden: Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. Twayne, New York 1966.
  • Jeffrey D. Groves: Frederick Goddard Tuckerman in the Canon of American Literature . In: DAI 48: 7, 1988.
  • Andrew Hudgins: A Monument of Labor Lost: The Sonnets of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman . In: Chicago Review , 37: 1, 1990, pp. 64-79.
  • N. Scott Momaday: The Heretical Cricket . In: Southern Review 3, 1967, pp. 43-50.
  • Yvor Winters : A Discovery 1950. In: Yvor Winters: Uncollected Essays and Reviews. Swallow Press, Chicago 1973.

Web links

Wikisource: Poems of frederick goddard tuckerman  - sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Shira Wolosky: Santayana and Harvard formalism. In: Raritan: a quarterly review 18: 4, 1999. pp. 57-58.
personal data
SURNAME Tuckerman, Frederick Goddard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American poet
DATE OF BIRTH February 4, 1821
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston
DATE OF DEATH May 9, 1873
Place of death Boston