Фредерик Годдард Такерман: Забытый американский поэт

American poet

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (February 4, 1821 – May 9, 1873) was an American poet, remembered mostly for his sonnet series. Apart from the 1860 publication of his book Poems, which included approximately two fifths of his lifetime sonnet output and other poetic works in a variety of forms, the remainder of his poetry was published posthumously in the 20th century. Attempts by several 20th century scholars and critics to spark wider interest in his life and works have met with some success and Tuckerman is now included in several important anthologies of American poetry. Though his works appear in 19th century anthologies of American poetry and sonnets, this reclusive contemporary of Emily Dickinson, sometime correspondent of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and acquaintance of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, remains in relative obscurity.

Eugene England discusses Tuckerman's position as a Romantic poet and his work in relation to that of Ralph Waldo Emerson: "He is not merely a Romantic, nor yet exclusively an anti Romantic; not just influenced by Emerson or simply reacting against Emerson's excesses With the Romantics, Tuckerman yearned to be at home in the universe, to feel himself deeply related to its central reality, and he understood and participated in various efforts to bring that about—including the Emersonian temptation to assert a pantheism that would make everything divine and thus destroy all ethical distinctions and exalt simple merging, including the final merge of death. But Tuckerman also realized that alienation is part of the price we pay for our humanness, for conscious life and perceived feeling, that the void between the mind and the world remains, unless we destroy the mind in primitivism or death—or do away with the world in some form of subjectivism.

In 1909, Walter Prichard Eaton, drama critic and essayist, wrote an article in Forum about Tuckerman and his poetry, after seeing two sonnets in an unpublished manuscript of an anthology of American poems written by Louis How. This article inspired Witter Bynner to enter into correspondence with one of the poet's grandchildren, thereby finding the manuscripts for the remaining sonnets. He published the results in 1931.) Critical Foreword by Yvor Winters and a biographical/critical introduction by Momaday. Another writer cited by Momaday in his survey of the revival of interest in Tuckerman's poetry is Edmund Wilson, in his work Patriotic Gore. In that work, Wilson predicted a permanent revival of Tuckerman and his works after the publication of his most famous ode: "A further posthumous poem, The Cricket, was printed, in 1950, as a leaflet by the Cummington Press of Cummington, Massachusetts. So Tuckerman has emerged at last from the obscurity which the retirement of his life invited." Wilson also provides an appreciative short summary of Tuckerman and his works, citing several poems in their entirety. The only recent critical work of significant length on Tuckerman and his work is Beyond Romanticism: Tuckerman's Life and Poetry (1991), by Eugene England. A selection of Tuckerman's poetry appears in Three American Poets (2003), edited by Jonathan Bean. His sonnets are sprinkled through several American poetry and sonnet anthologies. The Library of America's American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 2 (1993) contains over 20 selections. The most recent selection is Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (The John Harvard Library) (2010), edited by Ben Mazer.

Poet's Seat Tower is a 1912 sandstone observation tower in Greenfield named for the site's attraction to poets, particularly Tuckerman.

Cady, Edwin. 1967. "Frederick Goddard Tuckerman", in Essays on American Literature in Honor of Jay B. Hubbell, edited by Clarence Gohdes. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Donoghue, Denis. 1984 (reprint). Connoisseurs of Chaos: Ideas of Order in Modern American Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press. England, Eugene. 1991. Beyond Romanticism: Tuckerman's Life and Poetry. Provo: SUNY Press. Golden, Samuel A. 1966. Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. New York: Twayne Publishers. Lynch, Thomas P. 1969. "Quick Fire for Frost": A Study of the Poetry of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. (dissertation) Columbia University. Wilson, Edmund. 1994 (reissued). Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. W. W. Norton & Company. Winters, Yvor. 1967. Part II of "The Post Symbolist Methods," 253 63. In Forms of Discovery: Critical & Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English. N. p.: Alan Swallow.