Henry Theodore Tuckerman
Henry Theodore Tuckerman (born April 20, 1813 in Boston ; died December 17, 1871 in New York ) was an American writer, poet, literary critic and art critic.
Life
Tuckerman was born in 1813 to a well-off Boston family and received an extensive education in the best schools in town. In 1831 he began studying at Harvard University , which he had to drop out due to health problems. 1850, however, the University awarded him honorary title Master of Arts .
For spa stays he visited Italy and France in 1833, Sicily, Florence, Malta and Gibraltar from 1837–39. After his stays in Europe, Tuckerman published the travel sketch The Italian Sketch-Book and the romantic, maudlin travel novel Isabel, or Sicily: a Pilgrimage . His polished prose was well received, was praised by Washington Irving , among others , and so he was able to distinguish himself as a columnist, essayist and literary and art critic of various magazines over the next few years. He wrote regularly for Walsh's Review, North American Review, Graham's Magazine, Literary World, Southern Literary Messenger, and the Christian Examiner , among others .
In 1845 Tuckerman settled in New York , where he was soon a permanent guest in Anne Charlotte Botta's literary salon . There he got to know numerous American greats and played an important role in the intellectual life of the city until the end of his life. In particular, he had a close friendship with Herman Melville . Tuckerman also made friends with Giuseppe Garibaldi , who fled to New York in 1850 after the defeat of the Roman Republic. In the years that followed, Tuckerman was one of the most prominent American advocates of the Risorgimento, and Garibaldi in particular. For example, shortly after the " Train of the Thousand " in the January 1861 issue of the influential North American Review, he placed an exuberant article about Garibaldi, which may have contributed to the widespread support for Garibaldi in the American public.
Literary work
Tuckerman wrote poetry and tried his hand at Isabel as a novelist, but his reputation was based primarily on his essays . In his travel sketches he tried to bring his American readers closer to the peculiarities of European nations, in his later works he increasingly shifted to American subjects . A Month in England includes a report on the stormy reaction of the British reading public to the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin . In America and Her Commentators from 1864 he dealt with the self-perception and the perception of others in American culture; The work's efforts to restore the self-confidence of the American nation , which was clouded in the face of the Civil War .
1853-57 Tuckerman published mainly biographical essays on figures from American and European history and culture. His last work was a biography of the politician and writer John Pendleton Kennedy . His literary critical works include Thoughts on the Poets , which was also translated into German in 1856, and the series of articles Characteristics of Literature , in which he discussed the respective merits of William Shenstone , William Hazlitt , Edmund Burke and Edward Everett . These character studies are typical of 19th century philology in their impressionism and the endeavor to explain the work of an artist from his biography . At least Tuckerman deserves credit for being one of the first authors to attempt to portray American literary history . In 1852 he wrote a " A Sketch of American Literature " as an appendix to the American edition of Thomas B. Shaw's Outlines of English Literature . This textbook on the history of English literature, first published in London in 1846, was the definitive work of its kind in schools and universities on both sides of the Atlantic until the 1870s. In brief sections, Tuckerman presented a selection of American authors from the colonial era to around 1850 ; He named William Cullen Bryant as the best and most “representative” of American poets because of his “successful processing of native subjects, his religious sensitivity and love of freedom, combined with poetic skills”. Many now canonical authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson or Walt Whitman ignored Tuckerman or devoted only a few words to them; however, he paid tribute to Melville , who at the time had fallen out of favor with literary critics and forgotten by the wider public, when he updated his article in 1870 for a new edition of the Outlines of English Literature .
Tuckerman's understanding of literature and style was in keeping with Victorian tastes and conventional. Thanks to a literary feud with Edgar Allan Poe , posterity will remember Tuckerman above all as a perfectly good bore. Poe wrote in a polemic published in Graham's Magazine in December 1841 that Tuckerman's writings were "unbearably tough and boring." Tuckerman in turn pointed the following year as editor of The Boston Miscellany filed by Poe to reprint short story The Tell-Tale Heart (German The Tell-Tale Heart ) from: If Mr. Poe "quieter" submit articles condescended so Tuckerman, he certainly would be a good correspondents. Poe then wrote in his reply to the magazine: "If Mr. Tuckerman insists on his tranquility, he will surely soon be able to put the magazine, the direction of which Messrs Bradbury and Soden in their stupidity entrusted him, to eternal rest." Poe retaliated by coining the term tuckermanities in his poem An Enigma (German Ein Rätsel ) published in 1850 : The general tuckermanities are arrant / Bubbles- ephemeral and so transparent ("The general tuckermanities are outrageous soap bubbles, short-lived and so transparent"). In Charles Frederick Briggs ' The Trippings of Tom Pepper from 1846, a satirical key novel about American literary life, Tuckerman is caricatured as "Mr. Wooley, the calm critic from Boston, author of 'Some Quiet Thoughts on Literary Creation'".
Despite this malice, Tuckerman was a respected writer at home and abroad during his lifetime. In 1888 Meyer's Konversations-Lexikon went so far as to claim that since Washington Irving "hardly any American in the graceful and pleasing genre of national writing has done greater things and, as an art critic, has promoted the republic's artistic interests to a higher degree" than Tuckerman. While Tuckerman's style seemed too tame and polite to many of his contemporaries, it fell into oblivion in the 20th century (like many once respected writers of dignified bourgeois literature). The judgment Van Wyck Brooks made of Tuckerman in 1948 is indicative: “A shallow and diffuse critic with certain qualities as an essayist, a good memory and an agreeable style. He wrote intelligent platitudes on a high level and also had something resembling a passion for literature. ”Tuckerman's name is rarely mentioned in recent American literary stories.
Art criticism
On the other hand, Tuckerman's biographical and theoretical writings on the visual arts in the United States, which helped establish a canon of American painting, were of some influence . His Book of the Artists , published in 1867 - consisting of a preface, general essays on landscape painting, portraiture and sculpture, and 27 biographical articles on painters from John Singleton Copley to Albert Bierstadt - is one of the first attempts at the history of painting in the USA to represent in the art-historical framework and to grasp the national characteristics of American art. It is thus an expression of the emancipation of American culture aimed at at that time, as it was also expressed at that time in the formulation of an American national literature that was different from the English . The Book of the Artists vacillates between doubt and confidence in its assessment of the prospects for American art. For example, Tuckerman dealt with the role of the artist in a country in which there is no state funding for art and art is therefore more subject to commercial constraints than anywhere else, and came to contradicting conclusions: this compulsion to compete could indeed have an inspiring effect and even to it lead that American liberalism is expressed in painting, but he writes elsewhere that “the legitimate claims” of art are often “corrupted by the spirit of commerce”.
Works
- The Italian Sketch-Book (1835)
- Isabel, or Sicily: a Pilgrimage (1839)
- Rambles and Reveries (1841)
- Thoughts on the Poets (1846)
- Artist Life, or Sketches of American Painters (1847)
- Characteristics of Literature (1849–51)
- The Optimist (essays, 1850)
- Life of Commodore Silas Talbot (1851)
- Poems (poems; 1851; digitized version )
- A Month in England (travel sketch, 1853; digitized )
- Memorial of Horatio Greenough (1853)
- Leaves from the Diary of a Dreamer (1853)
- Mental Portraits, or Studies of Character (1853; expanded edition 1857 as Essays, Biographical and Critical, or Studies of Character ; collection of biographical essays; digitized version )
- The Character and Portraits of Washington (1859)
- America and Her Commentators (1864; digitized )
- A Sheaf of Verse Bound for the Fair (poems; 1864; digitized )
- The Criterion, or the Test of Talk about Familiar Things (1866; essays; digitized )
- Maga Papers about Paris (1867)
- Book of the Artists (1867)
- Life of John Pendleton Kennedy (1871)
literature
- Tuckerman, Henry Theodore . In: Samuel Austin Allibon: A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors ... . Childs & Peterson, Philadelphia 1871. (Catalog raisonné)
- James Thomas Flexner: Tuckerman's "Book of the Artists" In: American Art Journal 1: 2, 1969. pp. 53-57
- Charles M. Lombard: A Neglected Critic: Henry T. Tuckerman . In: Etudes Anglaises 22: 4, 1969. pp. 362-69,
- Charles M. Lombard: Gallic Perspective in the Works of Henry T. Tuckerman . In: Bulletin of Bibliography 27, 1970. pp. 106-7.
Web links
- Literature by and about Henry Theodore Tuckerman in the catalog of the German National Library
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hershel Parker: Herman Melville 1851-1891: A Biography . Johns Hopkins University Press , 2005, p. 487.
- ↑ Herbert Mitgang: Garibaldi and Lincoln . In: American Heritage Magazine 26: 6 October 1975.
- ↑ Kermit Vanderbilt: American Literature and the Academy . University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia 1986, p. 84.
- ↑ felicitous use of native materials, as well as in the religious sentiment and love of freedom, united with skill as an artist
- ↑ Parker, p. 718
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↑ He is a correct writer so far as mere English is concerned, but an insufferably tedious and dull one.
Edgar Allan Poe: A Chapter on Autography (Part II) . In: Graham's Magazine , December 1841, pp. 273–286 ( digitized version ) - ↑ If Mr. Tuckerman persists in his quietude, he will put a quietus on the magazine of which Messrs. Bradbury and Soden have been so stupid as to give him control. Quoted in: Claude Richard: Arrant Bubbles: Poe’s The Angel of the Odd. In: Poe Newsletter II: 3, 1969
- ^ To Enigma in the English-language Wikisource
- ^ The quiet critic from Boston, author of 'A Few Calm Thoughts on Literary Creation'. cited ibid
- ^ Meyers Konversationslexikon 4th edition from 1885-92. Vol. 15, p. 897
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↑ This writer, still young, who had come from Boston, was shallow and diffuse as a critic, altough as a literary essayist he had definite virtues, a retentive memory, an attractive style. He expressed the intelligent commonplace on a high level, and moreover he had something resembling a passion for letters.
Van Wyck Brooks: The Times of Melville and Whitman . EP Dutton: New York 1947. p. 25. - ↑ Quoted in: Linda S. Ferber: The draft of a past. American art critic of the 19th century. In: Stephan Koja (Ed.): America. The New World in 19th Century Pictures. Prestel: Munich 1999.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Tuckerman, Henry Theodore |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American writer, poet, literary and art critic |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 20, 1813 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Boston |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 17, 1871 |
| Place of death | new York |