Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman ( born February 4, 1821 in Boston, † May 9, 1873 ) was an American poet.

Life

He was born the son of a wealthy Boston family; the botanist Edward Tuckerman was his brother, the writer and art critic Henry Theodore Tuckerman a cousin. In 1837 he began studying at Harvard University, but soon broke this off and moved on to Harvard Law School; In 1845 he received his license as a lawyer. After his marriage to Hannah Lucinda Jones 1847 he gave the legal profession, moved into his wife's house in Greenfield, lived on inherited wealth and went his academic hobby horses such as botany and astronomy after. In the 1850s he began to publish poems in various magazines such as The Continental Monthly and the Atlantic Monthly. Of great influence on his poetic creation was the work of Alfred Tennyson, whom he visited in 1855 in England and with whom he had an exchange of letters in the following years; still he corresponded with, among others, Longfellow, Emerson, and Hawthorne.

In 1857 his wife died giving birth to her third child. Tuckerman expressed his grief in some poems expression; ever his entire later work of melancholy, partly of despair is marked. 1860 appeared in Boston his first and only book of poetry. Tuckerman wrote mostly sonnets; in later editions of her work, they are usually subordinated to five cycles. Was he relatively unknown during his lifetime, so he got after his death it into total oblivion and was again "discovered" in the 20th century - a fate he shared with two contemporaries who also retired in Massachusetts lived and compacted, including Emily Dickinson and Jones Very.

Work

Tuckerman's rediscovery is mainly the merit of Witter Bynner, of Tuckerman's sonnets in 1931 had printed again, and the poet and critic Yvor Winters, who as probably the best poem in the English language in the 19th century named 1950 Tuckerman's work, The Cricket. Since then, Tuckerman has a solid, though not a central place in the canon of American literature and is often anthologisiert. Penguin Books was in 2003 under the title Three American Poets, a collection of poems of three American poets of the 19th century out; Tuckerman was here set aside Herman Melville and Edwin Arlington Robinson.

How many poems of the American Romantic sonnets have the Tuckerman's often the nature of the subject. Unlike the transcendentalists, Emerson ahead, the forests of New England, however, not a place of comfort and becoming one with nature are for Tuckerman; rather press his poems from the inability of the people, nature to "read" a doubt about the wisdom of the world. This doubt and the consequent despair were there, the winter also pointed out in his review of The Cricket. Superficially, this is an ode to cricket in the tradition of English Romanticism - especially sounds John Keats famous Ode to a Nightingale on. The nature calls forth here, however, not grandeur, but the fear of death; the sung Grille is projected winter - like Melville's White Whale - in their unexplainable to a timeless symbol of the " darkness of nature." The Cricket is also remarkable in the formal sense; it is the only poem Tuckermans that does not submit a metric formalism, but is like the poetry of Walt Whitman written in free verse, which would later characterize the poetry of the 20th century.