Joseph Rodman Drake is usually disposed of as a handsome and sentimental young New Yorker, who wrote one striking poem of fancy, "The Culprit Fay," and one fine song of loyalty, "The American Flag," who collaborated with Fitz-Greene Halleck on "The Croaker" papers, and died an early and lamented death in his twenty-sixth year. If its implications are properly followed through, this is not an unfair summary. "The Culprit Fay," according to a letter by Halleck, was the product of three days' writing in the summer of 1816. It has been frequently said that the poem was written as a conscious attempt to turn American scenery to literary account, Cooper maintaining that it could not be done, just as it is said of a slightly later date that Cooper wrote "The Pilot" to demonstrate how much better a sea story he could produce than had the anonymous author of "The Pirate." It makes little difference whether or not the anecdote was true; the basic self-consciousness of the American poet in 1820 was prevailing, and Drake gives open evidence of it in "To a Friend," "Niagara," and "Bronx." But, whether or not it was true, the fact is remarkable that nothing in the poem gives any active suggestion that Drake had any real background in mind. It reads like the product of pure and unbridled fancy, and for the modern reader who is sensitive to scrupulousness of diction, care in the use of verb-tenses, and a reasonable consistency and harmony in the imagery, "The Culprit Fay" reads like what it actually is the hurried product of a boyish mind.1 Yet, in its day, it was astonishingly popular. Said Halleck: "It is certainly the best thing of the kind in the English language, and is more strikingly original than I had supposed it possible for a modern poem to be." Lots of other people thought the same; but in this comment, and in its pertinence to the young poet, lies what seems to have been the essential difference between Halleck and Drake. Halleck could hardly conceive of originality in a 19th century American poem. For him, art had arrived at final standards. He believed in Pope and Christopher Wren and Handel and Gainsborough. There was nothing left to do but ring the changes on the chimes in their-Protestant Episcopal-temple of art. But Drake tried new things and rebelled at old. And, while he achieved little in his short lifetime, his efforts in poetry, all the best of them, were strainings at the leash of 18th century convention. In his stanzas, "To a Friend," addressed to Halleck, Drake wrote his best commentary on "The Culprit Fay's" shortcomings and those ambitions of his own with which Halleck never became fully infected. Militant poetry, he said, was not the only kind needed; America should come to herself. Fairies, imps, kelpies, vampires, spectres, demons, were not native to our soil. Fair reason checks these monsters at their birth. But there was left the whole realm of primitive American life and majestic American scenery. Drake was still all for splendidly remote romance. He saw no gleam of poetry in democracy or the crowded town; 1 For the most careful criticism of the poem yet written see Poe's comments in the Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. II, p. 326. "Life and Letters," ed. J. G. Wilson, p. 183. yet what he pleaded for was better than Georgian sonnets to milady's eyebrow: Go! kneel a worshipper at nature's shrine! And will you scorn them all, to pour forth tame Still will you cloud the muse? nor blush with shame The most spirited and lasting thing Drake wrote appeared as the twenty-seventh "Croaker," the only one of the series preserved in the 1835 edition of his poems. "The American Flag" belongs in the choicest group of national lyrics, with Dwight's "Columbia," Joseph Hopkinson's "Columbia the Gem of the Ocean," and Key's "Star-Spangled Banner." As poetry, it surpasses them all, rising to perilous heights but never quite falling into bathos. It is the more remarkable because it was not inspired by any momentary fear of, or lust for, battle. This, with his "Niagara," shows the promise and the ambition that were in him, and they lead the modern critic to feel that although "The Culprit Fay" has been a very much overrated poem, the early death of Joseph Rodman Drake is still to be lamented. FITZ-GREENE HALLECK (1790-1867). Halleck was born in Guilford, Conn., in 1790. As a boy, he read eagerly from the popular English poets, and wrote imitative verse. After a common school education, he went into business in Guilford, 1805-1811. For nearly forty years following, he held subordinate confidential clerkships in New York City, with Jacob Barker, 1811-1829, and in the office of John Jacob Astor, 1832-1849. From then till his death in 1867 he lived in bachelor retirement at Guilford, his own savings being supplemented by a small annuity from J. J. Astor and a further gift from W. B. Astor. His first success came with the "Croaker" papers, written anonymously by himself and Joseph Rodman Drake, and printed March-July, 1819 mainly in the New York Evening Post. In December, 1819, appeared the satirical poem, "Fanny," and from this time on to the end of his career he enjoyed the intense admiration of his fellow townsmen, the. respect of literary America, and the genial attentions of the kindlier spirits in London. I. Texts. The Poetical Writings of Fitz Greene Halleck. With extracts from those of Joseph Rodman Drake. Edited by J. G. Wilson. New York, 1869. (This includes "The Croakers.") Other important editions are: Fanny. New York, 1819. Alnwick Castle, with Other Poems. New York, 1827. Fanny and Other Poems. New York, 1839. Poems by Fitz-Greene Halleck. New York, 1839. Poetical Works, now first collected. New York, 1847. Complete Edition of Poems of Fitz-Greene Halleck. New York, 1858. The Croakers. First complete edition, Printed for the Bradford Club. New York, 1860. II. Biography. Life and Letters of Fitz-Greene Halleck. Edited by J. G. Wilson. New York, 1869. III. Criticism. New England Magazine, August, 1831. Graham's, September, 1843. Southern Literary Messenger, November 25, 1843. Fitz-Greene Halleck was the leading poet of the Knickerbocker School, the New York admirers of Irving. Although born in a southwestern Connecticut town in the late 18th century, he was really a product of New York City in the early 19th. He was only seven years younger than Irving, and one year than Cooper, and thus subject to the same formative influences. None were college graduates; all had educative business experience, and all travelled abroad. Coming up to New York as a young man, Halleck was taken into the company of the literary and of the consciously cultured social class. The people with whom he consorted were excitedly interested in the English literature of the hour, and for the most part were undisturbed by any desire for a native American literature.1 They were revelling in "The Lady of the Lake" and "Marmion"; in Campbell's "Pleasures of Hope," Rogers's "Pleasures of Memory,' Moore's "Melodies," Miss Porter's "Scottish Chiefs" and "Thaddeus of Warsaw," and, a little later, in "Waverley," "Guy Mannering," and "The Antiquary"-a succession of works that produced, said Halleck, "a widespread enthusiasm throughout Great Britain and this country, which has probably never been equalled in the history of literature." 2 With the rest of his generation, he was uncomfortably conscious that in actual American life the moon of romance had waned, and the sun of commercialism was at high noon. The not unnatural reactions against these two sets of facts led him at some times into sentimentalism and at others into satire: A heart that worshipp'd in Romance The Spirit of the buried Time, And dreams of knight, and steed, and lance, These had been, and I deemed would be This regret for the passage of the old days continually recurred in his verse, and, particularly, in the lines which he wrote between the ages of twenty-five and thirty. It appeared in "Alnwick Castle," "RedJacket," "A Sketch," "A Poet's Daughter," and "Wyoming," sometimes in simple lament at what had been lost and sometimes in protest at what had replaced it. "Life and Letters," ed. J. G. Wilson, pp. 262-3. 2 Ibid., p. 162. Yet not despairing entirely, he celebrated the chivalry of the Revolution in "The Field of Grounded Arms," made his greatest stroke for popular favor with the oft-declaimed "Marco Bozzaris," and, as a man of seventy-five, came out in "Young America" with one more flash at the sound of battle, though, rather sadly, with one concluding bit of cynicism at the end of this valedictory. Such a discontent as he felt with the uninspired and uninspiring qualities of American life found its more effective expression in satire. If he could not emulate Scott, he could imitate Byron, and, in a mild and well-mannered way, he did play with the measures of "Beppo" and "Don Juan," and suggests their author in his lighter moods. "It would be heaven," he had said one day in his twenty-third year, "to lounge upon the rainbow, and read Tom Campbell." Young Dr. Joseph Rodman Drake, standing by, was delightedly eager to share the perch. So their friendship began, but, working by logical contraries, what they arrived at some six years later was the quite different experience of sitting, as it were, in a metropolitan bay-window and reading the social signs of the times. What they read was recorded in the National Advocate and The New York Evening Post, under the signature of "The Croakers." Their success was equal to that of Irving and his associates in the, also anonymous, "Salmagundi Papers" of a dozen years earlier. But "The Croakers," through the Evening Post, had a much wider circulation than did the independently printed "Salmagundi's," and, coming in rapid succession, thirty-five in about one hundred days, were far more startling than the earlier series of twenty-odd which extended through a whole year. Finally, through their more direct satire, which was addressed to city celebrities by name, they challenged and held the attention of the townsfolk, who were amused at what they read and curious to know where the lightning would next strike. The most personal and local of these verses, as one looks back, have the least title to respect to-day, for the reason that they rely on immediate breakfast-table reading, by offering jaunty impertinences in the place of either sense or sentiment. The more general in theme had in them the same satirical canniness which belonged to the "Salmagundi's" and, in their simple and sometimes brutal directness, must have afforded then, as they do now, an immense relief to the reader who had been surfeited on the pompous imitations of the would-be classical poets. Go on great painter! dare be dull; No longer after nature dangle; Call rectilinear beautiful; Find grace and freedom in an angle: And while I've strength to write or bellow, So, in "The man who frets at worldly strife," and "To Simon," and "The Love of Notoriety," the young critics used shotguns instead of rifles as they popped at cheap pessimism, social extravagance, and self-puffery. For three months, from behind the ambush of their pseudonym, they bombarded the delighted city with their poetical confetti. The death of Drake, in September, 1820, which inspired Halleck's most famous lyric, broke up this literary partnership; but before that time Halleck had responded to the general applause with another popular satire, "Fanny." This was a poem of 175 six-lined stanzas, done in Halleck's best Byronesque manner. It was unsigned, like "The Croakers," but generally understood to be by one of the same hands. It tells the story of the sky-rocket rise and fall of Fanny and her father in wealth and social position, a story which gave every opportunity for cynical commentary on the ways of the world in general and New York in particular. In the literature of Manhattan, Stedman's "Diamond Wedding" has been the only thing to approach it, and both of them have been broadly and keenly applicable to the life of any rapidly growing commercial city. When, two years later, at the age of about thirty, Halleck had written "Marco Bozzaris," the best expression of his romantic side, he had risen to his highest point. With his nicety of taste, his keen eye, his fund of humor, and his frankness, he was an established literary and social favorite. He was the kind of handsome and courtly gentleman of the old school, as was Irving also, who became a friend and associate of the leading financier of the day. There was nothing restless or disconcerting about him. He was a critic of manners, but not of the social order. He probably knew little of Emerson, and he certainly disapproved of Whitman. In 1848, when less than sixty years, of age, he went back to his native town in Connecticut, and lived there till after the Civil War, totally unaffected as a man of letters, except as the conflict seems to have silenced him. But he was not alone, for when he sank into eclipse, all the "Knickerbockers" disappeared with him. Their vogue was over. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT (1794-1878) Bryant was born at Cummington, Mass., in 1794. He could trace his descent through both parents to the oldest Plymouth stock. After his early education, which was largely under clergyman tutors, his father, a country doctor, was able to send him to college, at Williams, for only one year. He subsequently became an attorney, and practised law from 1816 to 1825. Within the first three years, he had come to feel a repugnance to drudging "for the dregs of men," 1 and the tastes of success given him by his verses in the North American Review, his Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard in 1821, and his volume of poems in the same year, made natural his decision to go into magazine work in New York in 1825. The New York Review and Athenæum Magazine failed in a year, but after a few months of return to the law, Bryant was offered the assistant editorship of The New York Evening Post. Three years later, in 1829, he suc 1 See closing stanza of "Green River." |