Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

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.

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman was born on February 4, 1821, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Edward Francis Tuckerman (1775–1843) and Sophia May (1784–1870), a prosperous and distinguished Boston family. His siblings included: Hannah Parkman Tuckerman (1805–1859), Edward Tuckerman (1817–1886), the botanist, Samuel Parkman Tuckerman (1819–1890), the composer, and Sophia May Eckley (1823–1874), the spiritualist. His first cousin was Henry Theodore Tuckerman (1813–1871), an American writer, essayist and critic.

He entered Harvard University in 1841, but did not remain long, due to an eye problem, as recalled in a family genealogy, privately printed in 1917 by a relative, Bayard Tuckerman. 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 living a life of relative seclusion and retirement, which was considered strange one for a man in his middle twenties.

While Tuckerman preferred isolation, he traveled abroad, meeting at least one famous poet, and communicated with several other American writers of note. According to N. Scott Momaday, "In 1851, and again in 1854, Tuckerman journeyed abroad. On the first of these excursions he met Alfred, Lord Tennyson; on the second he was Tennyson's guest at Farringford. The friendship between the two men appears to have been fast and of long standing. We do not know what Tennyson thought of Tuckerman's poetry. On the second visit with Tennyson, the poet laureate gave him the original manuscript of Locksley Hall. Tuckerman published Poems in 1860; it was his only poetry collection published in his lifetime. "The American writers to whom Tuckerman sent complimentary copies of the 1860 Poems are an impressive lot. The list of recipients includes the names of Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Bryant, and Jones Very." The responses he received were polite and favorable. They generally distinguished "the intrinsic merit of Tuckerman's work and 'external success'", the likelihood of it meeting popular success "with the world". "The printing of Tuckerman's volume of poems in 1860 was the high point of his public career. When he had made his claim on the attention of the most respected literary men of his day, he returned to his seclusion. He continued to write, indeed, the best of his work was yet to come, but he never again exposed himself to the world."

Momaday offers a general estimation of the poet and the poetry: "Tuckerman was a man who made herbariums. He had an eye for the minutest aspects of the world. When he wished to focus upon the veins of a leaf, or to find a metaphor for the appearance of an evergreen spine, he could do so with extraordinary skill. His poems are remarkable, point-blank descriptions of nature; they are filled with small, precise, and whole things: purring bees and vervain spikes, shives and amaryllis, wind flowers and stramony. But Tuckerman has more to recommend him than an eye and a nomenclature. His sensibilities are refined; his sensitivity is acute. His experience is pervaded by an always apparent sense of grief. He knows well the side of Man that is most vulnerable to pain, and he treats of it throughout his work with respect and compassion, often with great power and beauty.

But he was also a poet of the nineteenth century, and one who admired Tennyson above others. There is a good deal of bad writing in Tuckerman, and there are many obscurities... [the faults] occur for the most part in the longer poems, especially those of narrative character. Often they are marred by a tediousness of expression and an overwrought consistency of mood."

Edmund Wilson comments on the issue of Tuckerman's obscurity: "One of the queerest features of Tuckerman's work is his habit of alluding, not merely to characters from Biblical or classical antiquity so obscure that one cannot believe they are real till one finds them in a concordance or a classical dictionary, but also to personages who cannot be found because their names have been made up by the poet."