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  #11  
Unread 10-16-2020, 10:17 AM
Aaron Novick Aaron Novick is offline
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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.
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  #12  
Unread 10-29-2020, 02:37 PM
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A. Baez A. Baez is offline
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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,

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[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":

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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.

Last edited by A. Baez; 10-29-2020 at 02:51 PM.
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  #13  
Unread 10-31-2020, 11:51 PM
Aaron Novick Aaron Novick is offline
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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.
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  #14  
Unread 11-02-2020, 08:58 PM
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A. Baez A. Baez is offline
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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!
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