A native of New York, began to contribute poetical compositions to the periodicals at a very early age. The first four of the Croaker Pieces (published in New York Evening Post, March 10–20, 1819), were written by him; after the fourth number, Fitz-Greene Halleck was admitted as a partner, and the literary firm was henceforth Croaker & Co. The lively satire of these sallies gave them a great reputation at the time of their publication. Drake’s longest poem is “The Culprit Fay;” his best-known composition, “The American Flag.” Their poetical merit is unquestionably of a high order. In 1836 a collection of Drake’s poetical pieces was published by Commodore Dekay, son-in-law of the author.

Personal

  I officiated as groomsman, though much against my will…. He is, perhaps, the handsomest man in New York—a face like an angel, a form like an Apollo, and, as I well knew that his person was the true index of his mind, I felt myself during the ceremony as committing a crime in aiding and assisting in such a sacrifice.

	Green be the turf above thee,
	Friend of my better days!
	None knew thee but to love thee,
	Nor named thee but to praise.
	*        *        *        *        *
	While memory bids me weep thee,
	Nor thoughts nor words are free,
	The grief is fixed too deeply
	That mourns a man like thee.

  The spirit, force, and at the same time simplicity of expression, with his artless manner, gained him many friends. He had that native politeness which springs from benevolence, which would stop to pick up the hat or the crutch of an old servant, or walk by the side of the horse of a timid lady. When he was lost to his friends one of them remarked that it was not so much his social qualities which engaged the affections as a certain inner grace or dignity of mind, of which they were hardly conscious at the time…. Drake’s person was well formed and attractive; a fine head, with a peculiar blue eye, pale and cold in repose, but becoming dark and brilliant under excitement. His voice was full-toned and musical; he was a good reader, and sang with taste and feeling, though rarely.

  There may be poetry as well as propriety in hiding the remains of a departed Poet, on the summit of a barren and useless sandy knoll, in the midst of a wide-spread salt marsh, with a lazy stream flowing in the distance, and it may, by an amazing stretch of imagination, be a very appropriate continuation of the imaginary compliment, to let the grave which such a spot contains, thenceforward take care of itself and become obscured, in every direction, by the bushes and weeds which surround it.

  He was buried at Hunt’s Point; and as Halleck returned from the funeral, he said to DeKay, “There will be less sunshine for me hereafter, now that Joe is gone.” A low monument of marble, surmounted by a quadrangular pyramid, rises above the grave where the poet’s remains have reposed for sixty-five years. The inscription is on one side, and reads thus: “Sacred to the memory of Joseph R. Drake, M.D., who died September 21, 1820.

	“None knew him but to love him,
	None named him but to praise.”

These lines were afterward slightly varied and improved by their author.

  For many years Drake’s grave was waste and neglected: the stone was overgrown, lichened, disjointed, broken; a fallen tree had thrown the tapering shaft to the ground. Now a Catholic club of the vicinage has beneficently assumed care of it, the monument is cleansed and renovated, and the brush is cleared away from its base. The steep little pathway is evidently trodden by many pilgrim feet, and we find a garland of myrtle crowning the obelisk, while fresh field-flowers—gathered, we hope, from the near-by fields where he loved to roam—lie upon the pedestal and are still aglitter with the dew of the morning. The poet’s grave is fitly placed amid the scenes he loved and sung. Yonder “his own romantic Bronx” lazily skirts the “green bank side” where he wrote; southward stands the venerable mansion he so often visited, where we may see the room he and Halleck habitually occupied; and all about the old place lie shores and scenes which inspired portions of his charming “Culprit Fay” and are portrayed in its imagery. Even in the desolate old cemetery we realize some of his poetic phrases: we feel the breeze “fresh springing from the lips of morn,” we see the hum-bird with “his sun-touched wings,” we hear the carol of the finch and the “winding of the merry locust’s horn” above the grave where the poet rests, reckless of these that once thrilled his senses and stirred his soul to song.

The Culprit Fay

  “The Culprit Fay” was written, begun, and finished in three days. The copy you have is from the original, without the least alteration. 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.

  It is a well-versified and sufficiently fluent composition, without high merit of any kind. Its defects are gross and superabundant. Its plot and conduct, considered in reference to its scene, are absurd. Its originality is none at all. Its imagination (and this was the great feature insisted upon by its admirers) is but a “counterfeit presentment,”—but the shadow of the shade of that lofty quality which is, in fact, the soul of the Poetic Sentiment, but a drivelling effort to be fanciful, an effort resulting in a species of hop-skip-and-go-merry rodomontade, which the uninitiated feel it a duty to call ideality, and to admire as such, while lost in surprise at the impossibility of performing at least the latter half of the duty with anything like satisfaction to themselves. And all this we not only asserted, but without difficulty proved. Dr. Drake has written some beautiful poems, but “The Culprit Fay” is not of them.

  A poem of more exquisite fancy—as happily conceived as it is artistically executed—we have hardly had since the days of Milton’s “Comus.”

  Discovers exquisite fancy and rare poetic beauty.

  It does not by any labored structure reveal that its origin was deliberate and not spontaneous. No poem done of set purpose ever flowed more freely and more easily; and as we read its tuneful measures we never think of denying the right of the fairy folk to dwell on the beautiful banks of the Hudson.

General

  As an exercise of that delicate imagination which we term fancy, “The Culprit Fay,” although the work of a youth schooled in fairy-lore and the metres of Coleridge, Scott, and Moore, boded well for his future. “The American Flag” is a stirring bit of eloquence in rhyme. The death of this spirited and promising writer was justly deplored. His talent was healthy; had he lived, American authorship might not so readily have become, in Griswold’s time, a vent for every kind of romantic and sentimental absurdity.

  Drake is, on the whole, less remembered by his own poems than by the beautiful tribute which Halleck made to his memory.

  Drake’s services to nascent American poetry also included the composition of a spirited lyric to “The American Flag,” familiar in the anthologies, and long a favorite with the school-boys of the nation. Its tropes are somewhat strained, and its sensational scheme narrowly escapes bombast; but on the whole—like a greater poem, Shelley’s “Cloud”—it avoids the pathetic and produces an honest and stirring effect upon the reader.

  A commonplace of American criticism is to compare Keats with a certain Joseph Rodman Drake. They both died at twenty-five and they both wrote verse. The parallel ends there. Keats was one of the great writers of the world. Drake was a gentle imitative bard of the fourth or fifth order, whose gifts culminated in a piece of pretty fancy called “The Culprit Fay.” Every principle of proportion is outraged in a conjunction of the names of Drake and Keats. To compare them is like comparing a graceful shrub in your garden with the tallest pine that fronts the tempest on the forehead of Rhodope.

  Drake’s poetry should not be read as if it had been written in our day, when poets are so plentiful that every versifier has their art at his finger-ends: it should be read as it was read when it was written, in the first two decades of the century, when poets were few among us, and their skill so limited and uncertain as to disconcert and irritate later readers. He had no American models whom he could study to advantage, only such rude workmen in verse as Dwight, Trumbull, and Freneau; and the only English models whom he knew, or for whom he seemed to care, were Moore and Scott. He could not have had a more manly master than Scott, though he might have found a more deliberate one, for Scott improvised rather than composed. Like Scott, Drake wrote too rapidly, and too carelessly; for whatever its merits, and they are considerable, since poetic invention is one of them, and spirited metrical movement is another, “The Culprit Fay” is an improvisation and nothing more—an improvisation which needed much, but never had any, correction. It is charming, however, for just what it is, being one of the pillars upon which the reputation of Drake rests, the other being his lyric, “The American Flag,” which is still the standard sheet in our Heaven of Song. No one but a poet could have written these two poems, to remember which is to remember Joseph Rodman Drake.

  He wrote several pretty things, among them a poem published after his death, entitled “The Culprit Fay.” This conventional tale of some tiny fairies, supposed to haunt the Hudson River, is so much better than American poetry had previously been that one is at first disposed to speak of it enthusiastically. An obvious comparison puts it in true perspective. Drake’s life happened nearly to coincide with that of Keats. Both left us only broken fragments of what they might have done, had they been spared; but the contrast between these fragments tells afresh the story of American letters. Amid the full fervour of European experience Keats produced immortal work; Drake, whose whole life was passed amid the national inexperience of New York, produced only pretty fancies.