[Aaron Novick]

I fully agree that, after Dickinson and Whitman, 19th century American poetry is largely a wasteland. I found Tuckerman while reading the Library of America's 2-volume collection of that century, and he stood out as pretty clearly the best of the rest.

I can see where "stilted" comes from, but I don't really share the sense. He's writing dense, thick poetry from a dense, thick fog of mind—the language suits his purposes. One man's judgment, of course.

Trumbull Stickney was quite fine as well—Stickney and Tuckerman both clearly outclass Longfellow, Poe, and all the other 19th century Americans I'd heard of going into the anthology.

[Mark McDonnell]

I think these are great, Aaron. I agree, they seem not so much stilted as knotty and tangled and searching in a way that seems utterly sincere to the mind that created them. From Wikipedia:

After Harvard, he entered the law school, graduating in 1842, and was admitted to the Suffolk Bar, reading with Edward D. Sohier (1810–1888). He later abandoned the practice of law, saying that it was distasteful. He then devoted himself to the pursuit of his favorite studies, literature, botany and astronomy.

In 1847, he moved to Greenfield, in western Massachusetts due to his love of nature and began a living a life of relative seclusion and retirement, which was considered strange one for a man in his middle twenties.

I like him even more now

[Bill Carpenter]

I like these too. With the predominance of imagery, the poet seems to be making his way, in part, to a "no ideas but in things" kind or art, or a more existential witnessing. Notwithstanding the historic and emotional meanings he finds in things, they seem to preserve an opaque life of their own.

I'm afraid I have to take exception to the disparaging remarks about Longfellow in this thread, and I hope I will be able to deliver on the exception at some point.

[Jim Moonan]

.
Yikes! These are astoundingly beautiful! He's Frost on steroids (no offense meant to either).
I will make every effort to preserve his name (and these four sonnets) for future reading. I've been looking and looking and looking for a way into the sonnet and I think I've found it. Thanks for that.
.
.

[Aaron Novick]

Glad you like them, Jim! He's such a master of the form.

Bill, perhaps you can give me a window into the virtues of Longfellow. I can't find them all by my lonesome.

[Alexandra Baez]

I’m thrilled to find someone else who has reacted the same way I did to my own recent discovery of Tuckerman (courtesy of a good friend who, when I voiced my appreciation, promptly sent me a copy of Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, with its illuminating introduction by Stephen Burt). It’s funny that I can so admire this writer whom Burt considers an “anti-Transcendental” even though I’ve held the candle for Thoreau and Emerson my whole life. Says Burt,

[Tuckerman] became an American poet of natural history, the American poet who best records the failure of the great nineteenth-century enterprise called natural theology. The Tuckerman of the sonnet series looks into himself, looks at the mullein’s golden stalks and at the ocean’s crests and troughs, looks for evidence of a just God there, and discovers—perhaps without ever having read Darwin—that such evidence is not to be found.

Tennyson, Hawthorne, and to some degree even Emerson did recognize the genius of Tuckerman in his own time, and according to Burt, “a few modern critics have called Tuckerman (it is genuine praise) ‘the American Tennyson.’” However, others panned his work for its eccentricities of form and syntax, and some Americans parodied him, as in this excerpt from "A Sonnet--After F.G.T":

The cloudy style, the verbal mist that floats
And glooms between the daylight and the dark—
The book, whose choicest lines we never mark,
The laurel, poisonous to nibbling goats…

For my part, Aaron, I, like you, relish this poet's continual experimentation with rhyme schemes and how well Tuckerman tends to pull off even the most daring of these. His relentless individuality, his precise observation of natural detail, and his sheer complex eloquence—all these traits led me quickly to recognize this poet as an undersung master.

[Aaron Novick]

That's a pretty funny parody, though it doesn't dampen my appreciation for him one bit. I haven't yet picked up the selected Tuckerman, but it's one of those books I'll definitely be grabbing.

[Alexandra Baez]

Yes, I enjoyed the parody and would like to hunt down the full sonnet. It doesn't dampen my appreciation for Tuckerman, either, although it does give me a certain degree of appreciation for the parodist. And yes, the Selected Poems has been "the book" on my dining table for a while now--I pick it up occasionally in the evenings when I have time for some reverie, to soak up some poems with a cup of tea!