Joseph Rodman Drake

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Joseph Rodman Drake

Joseph Rodman Drake (born August 7, 1795 in New York ; died September 21, 1820 there ) was an American poet. While his poems, in particular The American Flag and The Culprit Fay , were anthologized in many ways in the 19th century, today they have almost been forgotten.

Life

Drake, an early orphan, attended Columbia College and received under Dr. Nicholas Romayne also received a private training as a medical doctor; but he never practiced as a doctor himself. In October 1816 he married Sarah Eckford, a daughter of the wealthy shipbuilder Henry Eckford , was able to allow himself a generous lifestyle with the fortune of his wife and went on a trip to Europe in 1818. After he was diagnosed with tuberculosis , he went to New Orleans for a cure in 1819 - and to visit his mother who had moved there - but the climate could hardly alleviate his suffering. On his return to New York he withdrew completely from the public and died on September 21, 1820 at the age of only twenty-five. On his deathbed he is said to have ordered that his poems should be cremated, but his daughter got the first edition in 1835.

Drake's friend Fitz-Greene Halleck wrote an elegy on Drake's death shortly after his friend's death ( Green be the turf above thee ), which since then has often been printed with Drake's works. Drake was buried at Hunt's Point in the Bronx . A park named after him was inaugurated around his grave in 1915 and a small marble monument was erected on which Halleck's lines on Drake's death can be read.

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First page of an 1861 edition of The American Flag. At that time, the American Civil War broke out and a wave of patriotism began - Rodman's poem was reissued as an appeal to the spirit of union.

Drake began to write poetry in his childhood and was guided by European models, in particular the Irish-Scottish romanticism of Thomas Moore , Thomas Campbell and Walter Scott . His poetry gained fame with a series of humorous parlor pieces to amuse the better circles of New York, which appeared in the Evening Post from 1819-20 under the pseudonym Croaker (German "Krächzer"), soon became the talk of the town and reprinted elsewhere were. Fitz-Greene Halleck joined the literary game of hide-and-seek and soon published poetry under the pseudonym Croaker, Jr .; The last poems of the series, whether written by Drake or Halleck, appeared under the collective pseudonym Croaker & Co. The Croaker Pieces , all in conventional iambic penta- or tetrameters , mostly comment on contemporary local politicians, personalities and fashions and appear more likely to today's readers as gossip ; The Croaker's gentle mockery included John Trumbull , whose painting The Declaration of Independence (1795) appeared to poets to be ridiculous in intent and execution, the awkward language of the New York Health Department's annual report, the intrigues of Tammany Hall and the poet James Kirke Paulding . The most recently published poem from the Croaker series is best known to this day: The American Flag , a patriotic and pathetic ode to the flag of the United States . The recognition that the work found and continues to find among its readers is probably less due to its literary qualities than to its patriotic way of thinking. For example, William Ellery Leonard, in his contribution to Drake in the Cambridge History of English and American Literature , wrote that the poem could still stir the blood of anyone but a literary critic. The poem has been set to music on various occasions and sung on official occasions.

Further poems by Drake appeared in book form in 1835. The longest poem in the volume, The Culprit Fay - a kind of epic art fairy tale about fairies on the Hudson River - received special attention . It is apparently inspired by Wieland's Oberon , which was translated into English by John Quincy Adams in 1799 . The Cyclopedia of American Literature (1856) by the Duyckinck brothers notes that Drake came up with the idea for this poem in a conversation with Halleck, James Fenimore Cooper, and James Ellsworth De Kay , during which the question of whether American nature is different was discussed not as well as the Scottish (for example in Robert Burns ) as a subject of romantic poetry. While Cooper and Halleck found this impossible, Drake set out to prove them wrong. The poem received rapturous praise from contemporary critics, Edgar Allan Poe alone was not impressed and described Drake's poetry in his review of the volume for the Southern Literary Messenger outright ridiculous. After a litany of the general ineptitude of American literary critics, he went into detail on the weaknesses of Drake's poetry, which relied too much on trite comparisons and the enumeration of lovely but arbitrary details.

Drake's poems were reprinted many times in the decades after his death, anthologized and canonized in the early accounts of American literary history, for example in the Cyclopedia of Duyckincks and Rufus Wilmot Griswold's The Poets and Poetry of America (1856). Drake has often been referred to as the "American Keats ", at least because of the parallels in the lives of both - both were born in 1795, studied medicine and turned to poetry, and both died young of tuberculosis. More recent literary histories have followed Poe's judgment and lead Drake at best as a third-rate poetaster, compared to his contemporaries Bryant or later romantics like Emerson , his poetry appears all too conventional and trivial.

literature

Factory editions

Secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Evert Augustus Duyckinck, George Long Duyckinck: Cyclopaedia of American Literature. Charles Scribner, New York 1856. pp. 201 ff
  2. ^ New York City Department of Parks & Recreation: Joseph Rodman Drake Park
  3. ↑ Barbara Packer: American Verse Traditions. In: Sacvan Bercovitch (Ed.): The Cambridge History of American Literature. Volume 4: Nineteenth-Century Poetry. Cambridge University Press, 2004. pp. 33-34
  4. ^ William Ellery Leonard: Bryant and the Minor Poets: §25 Joseph Rodman Drake. In: WP Trent, J. Erskine, SP Sherman, C. Van Doren (Eds.): The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. Cambridge 1907-21. Volume 15, Book II, Chapter V.
  5. ↑ Richard E. Mezo: Drake, Joseph Rodman. In: American National Biography Online , February 2000: http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-00477.html
personal data
SURNAME Drake, Joseph Rodman
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American poet
DATE OF BIRTH August 7, 1795
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH September 21, 1820
Place of death New York City