Three American Poets

Tuckerman is an intriguing, neglected poet (check out the Wikipedia article on him) whose works are to be found in reprints and somewhat pricey older collections The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman., though I see that a new selected poems is due out in April 2010 Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (The John Harvard Library). A decent sampling of his verse can be found in this Penguin Classics edition. I discovered him for myself last summer and I was pleasantly surprised how quickly and easily I was drawn into his art.

If you're toting up American poets of the 19th century, Dickinson gets one finger, Whitman another, but who's on third? A friend recently told me the smart money's on Tuckerman (Tuckerman?), and the only Tuckerman I could find is in this volume, wedged between the wet log of a poet that's Melville--lots of smoke and dramatic crackle, little flame--and E.A.R., who got enough laurel in his own life to really deserve space here. (There's also small connection with Melville and Tuckerman, born two years apart and both similarly neglected.) Tuckerman was the laureate of autumnal gloom, with winter's blast just around the corner. He came to his melancholy honestly, losing an infant daughter, then his beloved wife in childbirth, after which Tuckerman withdrew to Greenfield, MA and let the Civil War and pretty much everything else roll past him. His poems are dense, knotty verbal contrivances that are a world away from the populist bounce of so many of his contemporaries; the subject matter's death-drenched and wrenching while staying this side of Goth. Penguin stuck out its neck on this one and I'm glad. On to Clarel ...