Martin F. Tupper

Not an easy guy to find a lot of information about, which in itself is interesting because according to Wikipedia, "His most famous work, Proverbial Philosophy (1838), sold much more heavily than the works of any of his more important contemporaries, including Tennyson, at least in the middle decades of the century... and its significance now is almost wholly as an index of the intellectual and literary tendencies of Tupper's class and time." Poor guy just kind of fizzled out. I think that, in relation to Whitman, Tupper is relevant because he represents the everyday "philosophies" of the victorian middle class, while Whitman represents a break from those traditions in a purely American fashion. Even as early as the 1870s, Tupper exists as a kind of punch-line for other poets like Longfellow and Tennyson. If Tupper represents the Victorian, and his work is being mocked only 30 short years after publication, perhaps the world was more ready for a Whitmanian break from poetic tradition than some critics let on.