Tweet-a-Week: Martin F. Tupper

Tupper decided to try his luck sharing his work with the American public, falling flat on his face for not gaining popularity. However, when he published "Proverbial Philosophy", he garnered wide acclaim that, in newspaper reviews, swindled over time. If being considered "Tupperish" is essentially bad, and Tupper also had a piece of work called "The Crock of Gold", I sort of wonder of the phrase "crock-pot" relates to him in some way...that aside, after some quick glancing around, I'm still not quite sure what "Proverbial Philosophy"  is all about. Perhaps it's reputation became what people thought it to be, much like how Leaves of Grass turned out to be for some people.
According to Joseph L. Coulomb's ""To Destroy the Teacher": Whitman and Martin Farquhar Tupper's 1851 Trip to America", "Whitman openly admired the popular English author of "Proverbial Philosophy" (1838). Whitman had written in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle that, "the author, Mr. Tupper, is one of the rare men of the time." Tupper had received much backlash and overall public attention, and Whitman not only caught notice of the man's somewhat celebrity status via the newspaper accounts, but also used it to promote himself.
Critics even compared Tupper and Whitman several times, though it was usually in a negative light. For example, again, according to Coulomb's article, "a reviewer for the London Leader described Whitman's verse as 'wild, irregular, unrhymed, almost unmetrical 'lengths,' like the measured prose of Mr. Martin Farquhar Tupper's Proverbial Philisophy." Also "in the London Examiner, a critic supposed that, had Tupper been a self-satisfied backwoods auctioneer, 'reading and fancying himself not only an Emerson but a Carlyle and an American Shakespeare to bot,' then he would have written a 'book exactly like Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass", suggesting that the two are inter-related. Whitman had these two reviews included in his 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass, again continuing his use on Tupper's reputation to garner his own attention. It's interesting that, sort of like Whitman, Tupper started out as a "nobody" in the United States known for poorly written work, and Whitman decided to use the scandalous image of Tupper to get himself out there -- to mix "outcast" with "outcast". Indeed, perhaps the outlandish and crude method did build up on his messages in Leaves of Grass or made him seem more lowly -- but in the end, it probably served Whitman's intentions no matter what.


Coulombe, Joseph L. ""To Destroy the Teacher": Whitman and Martin Farquhar Tupper’s 1851 Trip to America." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. 1996: 199-209. Web. 14 Mar. 2012. <http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1533&context=wwqr>.