[In the following excerpt from an article on Halleck and Drake, Slater discusses Halleck'spoem Fanny and argues that Halleck's poems and those of other popular but relatively minor figures should not be excluded from literary study.]

Sixty years ago they were still being called the Damon and Pythias of American poetry: a young Park Row physician, dead of tuberculosis at twenty-five, and a young South Street accountant, who wrote the epitaph that was chiseled into his friend's gravestone. Before that, they had been known, in the touching provincialism of the early nineteenth century, as the American Keats and the American Byron. Now their books are shelved, unborrowed, with those of Gulian Verplanck. Even their sonorous names, Joseph Rodman Drake and Fitz-Greene Halleck, are blurred in the memory and their identities confused. Which one is buried in the trash-strewn park on Hunt's Point? And who wrote the only lines by either poet that anybody now remembers: "Green be the turf above thee / Friend of my better days"? Apart from the selections in Kendall Taft's Minor Knickerbockers—available only in an expensive facsimile edition for libraries—and "Marco Bozzaris," which is quoted in an introductory section of the new Brooks-Lewis-Warren anthology, not one of their poems seems to be in print. Neither Drake nor Halleck is even mentioned in the two most recent histories of American poetry. For the third of a century, no article on American literature appearing in current periodicals has disturbed them. One is tempted to say, with Poe's Montresor, "In pace requiescant."

But the affectionate respect which enveloped the two poets and their few poems for almost a hundred years makes one reluctant to drop them into the litter basket of literary history.…

In 1877, ten years after the death of Halleck, almost thirty years after his retirement from business and from New York, almost fifty years after he had ceased to write poetry, the city which had been the scene and in large part the subject of his brief career unveiled a statue of him in the Mall of Central Park. It was the first such statue of an American poet, and the ceremony which accompanied the unveiling was surely the grandest ever performed for an American man of letters—or likely ever to be performed. The day was the fifteenth of May, sunny and windy. There was a "great crowd in attendance"; there was a splendid assembly of very important persons, among them two generals—one of them William Tecumseh Sherman—the Mayor, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Interior, President Rutherford B. Hayes, and William Cullen Bryant. There was also the Seventh Regiment, marching through the 74th Street gate, "their band playing, their bayonets glinting through the green foliage," to be reviewed by Hayes and to escort him to the Mall.

The aged Bryant, influenced perhaps by the glinting bayonets, spoke first about Halleck's martial poems, especially "Marco Bozzaris," but praised also "the genial and playful spirit in which" he had "satirized the follies of NewYork society." Hayes, addressing the Mayor before he drew aside the bunting which veiled the statue, described Halleck as "the favored of all the early American poets": "In his life he honored the City; his works will honor the City forever. In behalf of the subscribers, I present this statue through you to the City of New-York. You will preserve it; you will prize it; you will keep it forever in these beautiful grounds as one of the precious treasures of your beautiful City." John Greenleaf Whittier had written a poem about Halleck "for the occasion" but had not been well enough to travel to New York, and so it was read by General James Grant Wilson, Halleck's biographer and editor. It charged the city to make room among the "graven shapes" of soldiers and statesmen for "one whose gift was song." …

Halleck's brief poetic career began with Croaker and Company. Five years older than Drake, he had produced his share of undistinguished juvenilia and ridden on a rainbow reading Tom Campbell, but until March, 1819, he could hardly have called himself a poet. Then suddenly he was Croaker, Junior, and the talk of the town. He seems to have written about half of the Croaker poems, either alone or as a partner in the company, and to have discovered himself in the poetic identity which Drake had invented. Without the noms deplume of the newspapers and the initials which Halleck penciled into a copy of the 1860 edition, it would be almost impossible to tell one Croaker from another. Halleck's verses were perhaps more varied and nimble. Here is a stanza by Croaker and Co. of which the tune seems to be Drake's:

The horse that twice a week I ride.
At Mother Dawson's eats his fill;
My books at Goodrich's abide,
My country-seat is Weehawk Hill;
My morning lounge is Eastburn's shop,
At Poppleton's I take my lunch;
Niblo prepares my mutton chop,
And Jennings makes my whiskey-punch.

And here is one by Croaker, Junior:

There's a wonderful charm in that sort of renown,
Which consists in becoming "the talk of the town;"
'Tis a pleasure which none but 'your truly great" feels,
To be followed about by a mob at one's heels;
And to hear, from the gazing and mouth-open throng,
The dear words, "that's he" as one trudges along;
While Beauty, all anxious, stands up on tip-toes,
Leans on her beau's shoulders, and lisps "there he goes."

But throughout the sequence the subjects are the same, the tone is the same, there is the same delight in detail and in New York. It is hardly surprising that many victims and spectators thought the game had been played by a single "wicked wag called Croaker."

The last squib was set off in the Post on July 24, 1819. A few months later Drake's illness recurred, and that winter he fled, vainly, to New Orleans; he seems not to have written again. Halleck, knowing now the nature of his own gifts and the delights of using them, turned almost immediately to the composition of a long poem somewhat in the Croaker mood, somewhat in the manner of Frere and late Byron, but curiously different. It was finished by the fall and published, anonymously, in December. Fany, he called it.

A bookshop triumph, partly because its Croaker affiliations were immediately recognized, Fany was handsomely treated by reviewers—one of whom thought it much better than Byron's Beppo—widely imitated, and even "continued" by another hand so that Halleck was obliged to write a sequel of his own for the second edition in 1821. What Drake thought of the first edition, reading it perhaps on his winter journey to New Orleans, perhaps on his spring voyage home, is unrecorded; sadly so, for Fanny was the poem he might have written, the major achievement of the poet whom Poe called Drake-Halleck.

Poe disliked Fanny. He found its meters so neglectful of "the laws of verse," that he actually scanned a few lines to demonstrate their irregularity and rewrote two which he discovered to be "deficient in half a foot." He was also offended by "the forced introduction of one or two serious songs, put into the mouth of the parvenu, in defiance of every thing like keeping." George Parsons Lathrop, though less pedantic than Poe, considered Fanny "the flattest, tamest, dreariest of comic poems" and thought the lyrics "enigmatic" and in themselves feeble. What Poe and Lathrop saw in Fanny is indeed there. No verse so varied and flexible, so close to the rhythms of speech, had been published in America before 1819. No poem had been more consciously defiant of "keeping" a traditional consistency in genre and tone. The comedy is low-keyed and gently sad. Of course the lyrics are feeble: they are the work of a newly-rich merchant and politician who had kept "some fifteen years ago, / A retail dry-good shop in Chatham Street" and who feels, along with ambition for himself and his daughter, the "fire of poetry within him burning." They are hardly enigmatic even if the poem is read as simply satire aimed at a parvenu.

Fanny is to some degree such a satire; it records teasingly the steps by which a man climbs from Chatham Street to Broadway and "a mansion of the best of brick," where

when the thousand lights of spermaceti
Streamed like a shower of sunbeams—and free tresses
Wild as the heads that waved them—and a pretty
Collection of the latest Paris dresses
Wandered about the room like things divine,
It was, as I was told, extremely fine.

But the merchant is at worst vain, foolish, and imprudent, and vanity and folly are for Halleck the amiable weaknesses not only of his beloved New York but of the world. Miss Fanny is a pretty girl "whose high destiny it was to breathe / Ere long, the air of Broadway or Park Place," a little forward perhaps

and yet
The lady meant no harm; her only aim
Was but to be admired by all she met,
And the free homage of the heart to claim;
And if she showed too plainly this intention,
Others have done the same—'twas not of her invention.

The narrator stands at no great distance from Fanny and her father, stands for no notably superior moral or social values. When the chandelier falls to the polished floor and the mansion totters, neither narrator nor reader rejoices. Money vanishes, a sign says "this house is to let," and Fanny and her father "live now, like chameleons, upon air / And hope and such cold unsubstantial dishes." What has happened is a fall, not a tragic one surely but not quite a comic one either. The merchant's "sentimental song—his saddest, and his last"—with which Fanny concludes—is written after he has heard the band playing, as it does once a week from the balcony of Scudder's Museum on Broadway. The song is a parody of fashionable sentimentality, but Halleck does not entirely laugh at it, and he uses its last two lines, "And music ceases when it rains / in Scudder's balcony," to restate what has been the undertone of his comedy, which Poe—if he had been listening—would have recognized as melancholy.

Halleck continued to write for almost a decade after Drake's death. Indeed, for nineteenth-century readers his best poems were the touching elegiac stanzas he wrote for Drake and the melodramatic ones which made Marco Bozzaris an American hero. There were a few more satires in the Croaker style but sharper-edged, of which the best was a bit of political and personal sword-play called "The Recorder." There was a romantic-ironic traveller's sketch, "Alnwick Castle," which dramatically, sourly contrasted the chivalric past with a craven and commercial present. There were some graceful pieces of vers de société. But by 1826 Issac Clason, offended at the low state of contemporary American poetry—"Faugh!! thin small beer"—had exclaimed, "HALLECK, awake! shake off this drowsy sleep. / … You've found the silver nib of Byron's pen; / Prove that its iron stem can plow again." In 1829 Cooper complained to De Kay that Halleck's genius remained idle, and the following year a newspaper satirist, echoing Clason, chided, "Wilt thou be silent? Wake, 0 Halleck, wake!" In 1832 Halleck himself told an actress who had requested verses for the opening of a theater that he could no longer write, that he was "broad awake with both eyes from the morning-dream of poetry."

And now, a century and a half later, what courts should hear the case of two forgotten minor poets? Not, primarily, those of scholarship and criticism. We know probably as much as we shall ever know about both men. Nelson Adkins' biography of Halleck and Frank Pleadwell's of Drake seem as "definitive" and judicious now as they did in 1930 and 1935. Pleadwell's 1935 edition of Drake's poetry, to which his biography serves as a kind of introduction, is thorough and scholarly enough to have deserved the CEAA seal of approval and the ire of Edmund Wilson. To be sure, the only "complete" edition of Halleck is the one which James Grant Wilson did, with Halleck's assistance, in 1869; it needs to be replaced. There are probably a dozen smaller scholarly studies worth undertaking, and half that many critical examinations of poems long misunderstood or ignored. But the case is not really one for the higher courts. What "The Culprit Fay," the Croaker poems, and Fany chiefly need is to be read once again. They need a publisher who will put them and a handful of other Drake-Halleck poems into a pamphlet that can help to supplement and vary our portly, taste-shaping, canon-forming anthologies. Better still, they need an anthologist heterodox enough to make room for poems not of the loftiest order.

For some decades now the study of American literature has been a very solemn business. We have decided who our Major Writers are, read reverently in their deepdiving bibles and legends, and heard over and over again their dark, intricate, ecstatic music. As we should have done. But from the beginning—perhaps especially at the beginning, when the hideous and desolate wilderness was also Eden and the New Jerusalem and Columbia—there were other, lighter, merrier notes to be heard. From Nathaniel Ward's farcical celebration of the springing up of the Tenth Muse and Peter Bulkeley's witty Latin epitaph for Thomas Shepard to M'Fingal and The Hasty Pudding, from Lowell and Holmes to Ogden Nash and Cole Porter, from Old Possum and Auden to Hammerstein and Sondheim, our poetry has had its writers of scherzi. Without them the symphony would be incomplete, the past distorted. Somewhere in that consort Halleck and Drake belong.