Talk:Martin Farquhar Tupper

NPOV
''The commonplace character of Tupper's reflections is indubitable, and his blank verse is only prose cut up into suitable lengths; but the Proverbial Philosophy was full of a perfectly genuine moral and religious feeling, and contained many apt and striking expressions. By these qualities it appealed to a large and uncritical section of the public.''

Come on now, Tupper's 'poetry' sucks. I have an original copy of the 13th edition of Proverbial Philosophy, and know what I'm talking about. It's some of the most boring and pompous drivel that ever sold in the millions. However, it is not for us to judge its quality, nor to claim that the public liked it because it was good. (BTW, the last sentence quoted above is a non-sequitur; if the public were truly uncritical, they would not have been able to appreciate either the 'genuine moral and religious feeling' or the 'many apt and striking expressions' and would presumably only have bought it because everybody else from Queen Victoria down owned a copy.  Which they did, and which is probably a major reason why it sold so well.)

The more significant and verifiable fact about Tupper is that he was massively popular in the Victorian period, probably bigger than Tennyson and Browning, and yet now he is almost forgotten, and what little critical writing about him exists is almost entirely negative. He was the Robert James Waller, the Paolo Coelho, of his era. That, at least, can be demonstrated by the near-total eclipse of his enormous fame after his death. Lexo (talk) 00:59, 2 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Looking back at this post, and speaking as a slightly older and considerably more experienced WP contributor and editor, all I can say is that this article demonstrates the folly of importing public-domain Britannica articles into a 21st century encyclopedia. Lexo (talk) 00:25, 11 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Looking over it I came to exactly the same conclusions: that the text was wildly imbalanced (and more than a bit pompous itself) and thus it probably came from Britannica. This kind of writing does not serve Wikipedia well.--Father Goose (talk) 21:27, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

By now, this article seems to be biased in the opposite direction: Tupper survives if at all as a second-rate, puffed up poet whose success was only possible in a literary market where "philistines" might be able to approve of his platitudes. Wow, that's harsh. Surely a more neutral medium can be found? Robofish (talk) 15:46, 25 August 2012 (UTC)


 * Now, 2023, it's maybe too neutral or unclear. Perhaps Nina Baym's footnote on him in her section for Whitman in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, volume 3, sixth edition would give the proper tone: once very popular, now seen as trite.Kdammers (talk) 23:11, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
 * I've published an edit that's kept slices of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica but contextualised them a bit more as an indication of the extent to which the work fell out of favour, instead of quoting them outright as if they're NPOV. If expanded, it might belong better in the Legacy section. Very difficult to find secondary sources though. Garnet-Septagon (talk) 09:58, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

Who?
The text says that his grandson talked about him, with a parenthetical comment listing a remarkable list of achievements. As I read the text, the achievements are those of the grandson, but my hunch is that they are of the man himself. If they are of the grandson, then that man should be named and given a Wik article; if they are of the man himself, then that should be made clear. Kdammers (talk) 23:07, 28 February 2023 (UTC)


 * I agree; almost all that paragraph is a list of the grandson's alleged achievements, which are irrelevant, and at most it just acts as an advertisement for the website. I'll move the website to External Links because they do have bits and pieces about Tupper in Albury, but I'll remove the paragraph. Garnet-Septagon (talk) 12:29, 13 May 2023 (UTC)