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Zoë PollakPh.D. Candidate in English and Comparative Literature,
Columbia University |
Flowers Flung to the Offal-Heap": Sensuous Waste in the Sonnets of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman
Just before the start of the Civil War, as Emily Dickinson replaced the exclamation points that end-stopped her early poetry with the trademark dashes that forestall resolution, another Massachusetts poet published a series of sonnets whose closing lines are equally suspended. Largely uninterested in providing concluding commentary or allegorical extrapolations to achieve conventional resolve, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman left his readers with shocking natural images instead: a piece of rotting meat; a rock covered in bird guano; rain-drenched offal; a horse’s tooth. To encounter Tuckerman’s haiku-like imagism—gorgeously cadenced and often unsettling—at the close of a poem in a modernist anthology would not be unusual. Yet I argue that these efforts to foreground debris and detritus at the end of a sonnet are unparalleled in the oeuvres of Tuckerman’s anglophone predecessors and peers. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who deemed Tuckerman’s poems “remarkable,” was prescient in doubting that they would garner a “wide recognition from the public, either in England or America, because their merit does not lie upon the surface, but must be looked for with faith and sympathy, and a kind of insight as when you look into a carbuncle to discover its hidden fire.”[1] Indeed, since the sonnets series’ 1860 publication, most of Tuckerman’s critics have refused to sit with their discomfort at the poems’ graphic, open-ended images, and have consequently dismissed his finely-crafted sonnets as inexpertly vague and obscure. This study accords Tuckerman the sustained reading Hawthorne encouraged in order to make the case that Tuckerman’s groundbreaking formal poetics, which force readers to dignify subjects his coevals deemed unfit for verse, radically expanded the ethical and aesthetic affordances of the nineteenth-century American sonnet.
[1] N. Hawthorne, letter to F.G. Tuckerman (14 April, 1861); Selected Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Joel Myerson (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2002), pp. 235-36.
[1] N. Hawthorne, letter to F.G. Tuckerman (14 April, 1861); Selected Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Joel Myerson (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2002), pp. 235-36.
Zoë Pollak received her M.St. from Oxford, where she wrote her thesis on Robert Frost's sonnets. She is currently a doctoral candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and is writing a dissertation on small forms in 19th-century American literature. Her essay "You Bring the Weather With You" is forthcoming in Now Comes Good Sailing: On Henry David Thoreau and the Meaning of Life, ed. Andrew Blauner (Princeton, 2021).