Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821–73) wrote poems too weird to be much appreciated in his own milieu, the United States of the nineteenth century, and not weird enough to distinguish the poet for many of his later readers who, failing to squint, saw little more than an accomplished sonneteer. Those contemporaries of Tuckerman’s who might have otherwise enjoyed his work tended to quibble and find his handling of form a bit “rough.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, an admirer of the 1860 edition of Tuckerman’s Poems, a privately printed affair, appears to have had a grasp of the problem. “[I]f you could be read twice,” Hawthorne wrote to Tuckerman, “the book might be a success; but who reads (in a way that deserves to be called reading) so much as once, in these days?” Hawthorne reminds us that holding the attention of the distracted is a social problem that predates the hyperlinked webpage.

Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, edited by Ben Mazer and introduced by Stephen Burt, offers current readers an opportunity to pass over the passed-over poet all over again. They really shouldn’t; this is a crisp edition of some pretty fine verse. Still, a frustrated well-wisher may wish the poet had thought ahead and taken pains to include a few more surface novelties—a few more em dashes, maybe—to push the modern angle and scare up an audience.

But then, as Samuel A. Golden, his biographer of 1966, put it, “Tuckerman never thought of himself as a