The Culprit Fay and Other Poems

Description

Joseph Rodman Drake was one of the first American poets. He was born in New York City, he was homeless as a child, left without parents and welcomed in a merchant home. As a kid, he displayed a skill for creating poems. He was taught at Columbia College. In 1813, he started learning in a doctor’s office. In 1816, he started to practice as a physician and in that year, Joseph and Sarah tied the knot, daughter of Henry Eckford, a marine architect.

In 1819, along with his acquaintance and concomitant poet Fitz-Greene Halleck, he penned a series of entertaining poems for the New York Evening Post, which were printed with the pseudonym “The Croakers.” Joseph passed away of drinking a year after at only 25.

As an author, Joseph is regarded as part of the “Knickerbocker group”, which also involved Halleck, Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, James Kirke Paulding, Gulian Crommelin Verplanck, Robert Charles Sands, Lydia M. Child, and Nathaniel Parker Willis. A selection, The Culprit Fay and Other Poems, was printed after his death by his daughter in 1835. His most popular poems are those having long titles of that selection, and the fervid “The American Flag” which was set as a musical creation for two artists, choir and symphony by the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák in 1892-93. “The Culprit Fay” became an encouragement for a 1908 musical arrangement of the similar title by Henry Kimball Hadley.

Fitz-Greene Halleck’s poem “Green be the turf above thee” was composed as a deifying to Joseph. Joseph Rodman Drake Park in Hunts Point, Bronx, was designated after him in 1915. This park has been given $180,000 of New York State financing to honor a memory to slaves conceivably to be entombed there.
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