Sunday, February 04, 2007

I Have No Idea What Grasshoppers Look Like, I Guess

Below, Richard saucily proposes that instead of celebrating Marianne Moore this month, we should celebrate Frederick Tuckerman, a "really bad 19th-c. American poet absurdly overrated by Yvor Winters." I take issue with this characterization! Any man who is the wellspring of such images as "the old grasshopper molasses-mouthed" deserves our respect as well as our cartoons, and so I set Marianne Moore aside for the moment and celebrate him today:

Sleep soundly, Frederick Tuckerman; I pray that sticky-lipped bugs are gnawing you.

2 comments:

Richard Epstein said...

If your tastes run to the 19th-c version of Hallmark sentiments, set in irreproachable metres, and Longfellow and Bryant seem too familiar for the occasion, maybe Tuckerman will do. I look forward to your illustrations of such lines as,

Here, but a lifetime back, where falls tonight
Behind the curtained pane a sheltered light
On buds of rose or vase of violet
Aloft upon the marble mantel set,
Here in the forest-heart, hung blackening
The wolfbait on the bush beside the spring.

"[B]ud of rose or vase of violet" is just a little too much for me, and the image of home a bit too homely. I found myself reciting, "The pure products of America go crazy."

Patricia Lockwood said...

Whoa. Whoa. Why, Richard, have you made it your business to tempt me with wolfbait of the mind? I stand firm in my decision to celebrate Marianne this month, but when I at long last fling the one-poet-each-month theme to the wind and make EOICC a total free-for-all, wolfbait on the bush will be the very first thing I tackle.