In 1909, Walter Prichard Eaton, drama critic and essayist, wrote an article in
Forum about Tuckerman and his poetry, after seeing two sonnets in the unpublished manuscript of an anthology of American poems. This article inspired Witter Bynner to enter into correspondence with one of the poet's grandchildren, thereby finding the manuscripts for the remaining sonnets. He published the results in 1931.
N. Scott Momaday brought out the most complete edition available of Tuckerman's works, in 1965, with a quirky ("Winters's heretical, obdurate foreword") Critical Foreword by Yvor Winters and a biographical/critical introduction by Momaday.
Another writer cited by Momaday in his survey of the revival of interest in Tuckerman's poetry is Edmund Wilson, in his work
Patriotic Gore. In that work, Wilson proclaims, rather too hopefully, it seems, of a permanent revival of Tuckerman and his works after the publication of his most famous ode: "A further posthumous poem,
The Cricket, was printed, in 1950, as a leaflet by the Cummington Press of Cummington, Massachusetts. So Tuckerman has emerged at last from the obscurity which the retirement of his life invited."Wilson also provides an appreciative short summary of Tuckerman and his works, citing several poems in their entirety.
The only recent critical work of significant length on Tuckerman and his work is
Beyond Romanticism: Tuckerman's Life and Poetry (1991), by Eugene England.
A selection of Tuckerman's poetry appears in
Three American Poets (2003), edited by Jonathan Bean. His sonnets are sprinkled through several American poetry and sonnet anthologies. The Library of America's
American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 2 (1993) contains over 20 selections.
The most recent selection is
Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (The John Harvard Library) (2010), edited by Ben Mazer.
Notes
Editions of poetry
- Poems (1860)
- Sonnets of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1931) ed. Witter Bynner
- Frederick Goddard Tuckerman: The Cricket, Printed from His Notebooks with Permission of His Granddaughter Margaret Tuckerman Clark (1950) Cummington, Mass.: Cummington Press.
- The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1965) ed. N. Scott Momaday
- Three American Poets (2003) (A selection of the poetic works of Melville, Tuckerman and Robinson) ed. Jonathan Bean
- Selected Poems, (2010) edited by Ben Mazer with an introduction by Stephen Burt, Belknap Press (Harvard University Press), Cambridge, MA
Secondary sources
- Cady, Edwin. 1967. "Frederick Goddard Tuckerman", in Essays on American Literature in Honor of Jay B. Hubbell, edited by Clarence Gohdes. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.
- Donoghue, Denis. 1984 (reprint). Connoisseurs of Chaos: Ideas of Order in Modern American Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press.
- England, Eugene. 1991. Beyond Romanticism: Tuckerman's Life and Poetry. Provo: SUNY Press.
- Golden, Samuel A. 1966. Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. New York: Twayne Publishers.
- Lynch, Thomas P. 1969. "Quick Fire for Frost": A Study of the Poetry of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. (dissertation) Columbia University.
- Wilson, Edmund. 1994 (reissued). Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. W. W. Norton & Company.