Tweet of the Week: Martin Tupper, Proverbial Wisdom

Martin Tupper, an English didactic writer popular in America due to copyright/ circulation circumstances and efforts to reconcile the two countries, had many ideological differences with Walt Whitman, especially regarding aristocracy/social orders and conservatism. However, Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy, a text which Whitman owned, highlighted and may have even printed, employed the free verse form. It was not referred to as poetry by the author and was instead called “rhythmics.” Whitman appropriated this form, seeing it as the formal equivalent of his democratic philosophy. Some of Tupper’s poetry in standard form may have influenced Whitman, as Tupper’s “Are you a Great Reader?” is evocative of Whitman’s “Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?” Tupper uses some very Whitman-ian language, such as “I am untamed, a spirit free and fleet.” He mentions a “dull, grazing ox” which Whitman inverts with “Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain…what is it that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.” Apparently, Whitman’s lines sometimes intersect with Tupper’s in a dialogue that criticizes their “poetic commonplaces.” Early reviewers in England noticed and wrote about this connection.