Volume 4, Number 4 · March 25, 1965
An American Poet
By Irving Howe
The Complete Poems of Frederick Tuckerman
edited by N. Scott Momaday
Oxford, 288 pp., $6.50
Frederick Tuckerman, almost forgotten and certainly neglected, was a nineteenth-century New England poet, contemporary with the Transcendentalists but sharply different from them in outlook and style. During his lifetime he published a single volume, Poems, in 1860, which went through three further printings with minor textual changes; he won a very modest recognition, mostly through private letters from Hawthorne, Emerson and Longfellow. Living in near-isolation in the Berkshires, Tuckerman seems not to have cared about getting into print the work he composed after 1860; he was genuinely, and not as a mere literary strategy, the kind of poet who writes to himself; and once he died, in 1873 at the age of fifty-two, he passed into obscurity.
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