Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 207high political office, first in Spain, and then in Great Britain from 1880 to 1885,
as US ambassador.
By contrast, Tuckerman never really attempted to cater to or create an audience
and never achieved any public honors or recognition. Educated at Harvard, where
Jones Very was his tutor, he withdrew before his courses were completed. He returned
to take a law degree, was admitted to the bar but never practiced. Instead, he
devoted most of his adult life to the study of botany and the writing of poetry. He
also placed a great emotional investment in his domestic life, until the death of his
wife in childbirth in 1857. This loss inspired a series of sonnet sequences, written in
the period 1854–1860 and 1860–1872 and partly published in a privately financed
edition in 1860. Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow, and Alfred Lord Tennyson in
England all praised his work. It was reissued in two further editions during his
lifetime but, as with the first edition, these later editions were only noticed by a few.
The full series of sonnet sequences was not published until the twentieth century;
his long poem, The Cricket, did not appear in print until 1950; and The Complete
Poems was only published in 1965. His poems are not, as Tuckerman explains in
sonnet I of the first sequence, addressed to anyone. They are, rather, an attempt to
give objective life to a subjective complex of emotions. The result is, to some extent,
like later poetry, Imagist poetry for instance, in which a sequence of sense impressions
is presented as the equivalent of a sequence of emotions. Only to some extent,
however: the poetic voice of Tuckerman also bears comparison with the voices of
contemporaries, like the later Hawthorne and Melville. It is the voice of a man who
feels alienated from nature, from other men, and from God; who senses that there
might possibly exist “signs” in his environment that could lead him away from doubt
and into philosophical certainty, but who also suspects that those signs are beyond
his deciphering. “Still craves the spirit: never Nature solves / That yearning which
with her first breath began,” declares the poet in one sonnet. “For Nature daily
through her grand design / Breathes contradiction where she seems most clear,”
he admits in another. Thrust into a state of extreme isolation, and unable to see
beyond appearances, the most that the “I” of Tuckerman’s poetry can do is use those
appearances as an alphabet to spell out his own moods. For his fellow New Englander
Emerson, the self, the ego, was an assertive presence, illuminating the world and
creating the real. For Tuckerman, however, the self was very much on the defense
and trying to make what it could of its own defensiveness – its condition of captivity,
caught, as the poet put in it one of his sonnets, in what seemed like “an upper
chamber in a darkened house.”
“He is America,” Ezra Pound observed of Walt Whitman (1819–1892). “His
crudity is an exceeding great stench, but it is America.” Never frightened of being
called crude, Whitman would probably have appreciated the comment. And he
would have liked being identified with America because that was his aim: to speak as
a representative American and turn the New World into words. Whitman certainly
had this aim after the day in 1842 when he attended a lecture given by Emerson, in
which Emerson prophesied the imminent arrival of an American Homer to celebrate
“the barbarism and materialism of the times.” Whitman saw himself as the fulfillmentGGray_c02.indd 207ray_c 02 .indd 207 8 8/1/2011 7:54:43 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 43 AM