Martin F. Tupper

Martin F. Tupper was a 19^th century British writer and poet who is best known for his book Proverbial Philosophy, an amalgamation of sententious and morally driven tid bits by which Tupper felt we all should live by. While I have not read any of Proverbial Philosophy, I am imagining Emily Post’s book on Etiquette in vaguely poetic form. Very popular in its time (both in England and in the US), Tupper’s work was eventually cast aside by critics and Tupper became the personification of what bad literature was all about. Several of the British reviewers of Leaves of Grass used Tupper’s name to enhance the derision they bestowed on Whitman’s work. One of the more memorable comments came from The Examiner where the reviewer describes Whitman as “a wild Tupper of the West” and Leaves of Grass as something that could have been written by Tupper had he been banished to the backwoods and read Emerson and Carlyle until he went insane.

There is an interesting article in the Whitman Quarterly Review by Matt Cohen entitled “Martin Tupper, Walt Whitman, and the Early Reviews of Leaves of Grass.” While Whitman was aware of Tupper and probably had read some of his writings, he had not met Tupper which, as Cohen states, is not surprising given their complete opposite personal backgrounds. The most interesting aspect of the article is Cohen’s assertion that Whitman may have used Tupper’s work as the basis for the free form verse he utilizes in Leaves of Grass. So why would Whitman have used the poetic form of someone who was the living antithesis to the themes of his own poetry? This is a question that is probably impossible to answer with certainty, but it certainly reinforces the notion that Whitman was not afraid to cherry pick techniques and themes, even from people or institutions that he was fundamentally opposed to. Whitman was an aggregator of sorts, and there was no place that was off limits for his treasure hunt.