Drake, Joseph Rodman
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Joseph Rodman (1795-1820), an American poet. Born in New York City. The poet was distantly related to the admiral of that name. At the age of five he was a famous hand to get up conundrums. Having been banished to the attic one day for some offense, his sister started upstairs to see how the little seven-year-old was getting on and found him pacing the floor with a make-believe sword on his shoulder, guarding a heap of rubbish, and pretending that he was Don Quixote guarding his armor in the church. Drake tried clerking and then studied medicine. One sunny afternoon Drake and Fitz-Greene Halleck were sailing with a friend on New York Bay, when a slight shower came up and a rainbow spanned the sky. Halleck made the remark that "It would be heaven to lounge on a rainbow and read Tom Campbell." This brought Drake and Halleck together, and they became famous chums. They wrote a series of witty poems for the New York Evening Post over the signature of Croaker & Co. or Croaker, Jr. Drake's fame rests chiefly on an exquisite poem, the Culprit Fay. This poem was written in three days, in the heat of an argument with Halleck and Cooper, to prove that a fairy tale may be made to grow out of American soil. The American Flag is considered Drake's best shorter poem. It begins with the familiar lines: When Freedom from her mountain height Unfurled her standard to the air, She tore the azure robe of night, And set the stars of glory there, etc. At Drake's death, Halleck wrote a beautiful poem from which the following stanza is often quoted: Green be the turf above thee, Friend of my better days! None knew thee but to love thee, Nor named thee but to praise.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 sketch of Drake's short life — the boyhood conundrums, the friendship with Fitz-Greene Halleck formed over a rainbow on New York Bay, the Croaker verses, death of consumption at twenty-five in 1820 — still reads as accurate. What has fallen away is the confidence that his fame was secure: "The Culprit Fay," written in 1816 and published posthumously in 1835, was a staple of school readers and parlor recitation when Aiton wrote, and is now read almost only by specialists in early American Romanticism, in part because Edgar Allan Poe's 1836 review dismissed it as mere fancy rather than imagination. "The American Flag" survives in patriotic anthologies, though its closing lines are usually credited to Halleck rather than to Drake. His grave in what is now Joseph Rodman Drake Park in the Bronx, bearing Halleck's "Green be the turf above thee," is preserved as a small city park.
Written for this edition, 2026.