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Martin F. Tupper (1810-1889) was an English writer and poet. He had a rather distinguished and religious upbringing and was a scholarly type of man. Throughout his life he wrote and published many works of prose and poetry and was rather well-known in his day. Although he wasn't always thought of fondly (to be considered "Tupperish" by a reviewer was never good). However, if one were to mention his name, not many people would even have an inkling as to who he was, but he was influential in his own right.

Tupper was also Whitman's British contemporary and unsurprisingly, the two were inevitably compared as Matt Cohen points out in his article "Martin Tupper, Walt Whitman, and the Early Reviews of Leaves of Grass". A reviewer in 1856 basically says that if Tupper was banished to the middle of nowhere and was stuck reading Emerson and Carlyle until he lost his mind to the point hhe thought he was the "American Shakespeare", he would've written "a book exactly like Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Ouch.

Although the reviewers seem to want to make the connection between Whitman and Tupper, they are quite different. What in the world could a upper-class Oxford man have to do with Whitman the b'hoy? Well, Cohen thinks that Whitman's poetry was shaped by Tupper's wonderfully quotable Proverbial Philosophy, a series of didactic writing any and every topic worth philosophizing about.

it is suggested that they had never met. Their ideologies are quite different (since Tupper was more of the upper aristocratic class while Whitman is a b'hoy). However, as pointed out by Cohen, there are similar properties between "Song of Myself" and Proverbial Philosophy. These are the two examples

I am untamed, a spirit free and fleet,

That cannot brook the studious yoke, nor be

Like some dull grazing ox without a soul,

But feeling racer's shoes upon my feet

Before my teacher starts, I touch the goal.

-"Are you a Great Reader?"

versus

Oxen that rattle the yoke and chain or halt in the leafy shade, what is that you express in your eyes?

It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.
-"Song of Myself"

Cohen writes that that it would be quite interesting to consider that Whitman, the b'hoy, was influenced and shaped by Tupper. Although, even if Whitman was influenced by Tupper, it's not exactly wrong. After all, Whitman is supposed to be all encompassing in his poetry.