72 



Out upon the one path Bryant led the way for the new poetry 

 of America; down the other, toward the way of Glamour, 

 Drake started when he wrote The Culprit Fay. 



In point of length, in the novelty of its material, in the ambi- 

 tion of its design, The Culprit Fay is Drake's most conspicuous 

 poem. It is probably the earliest native poem of distinct 

 length to attain anything like a general popularity in America. 

 The facts about the composition of the poem are tolerably 

 certain, though it is interesting at such an occasion as this to 

 offer one or two minor corrections of the legendary account. 

 The poem, I have said, was written in 1816. Halleck fixes 

 the date by his endorsement of a manuscript copy of the poem 

 which he enclosed in a letter to his sister written January 29, 

 181 7. "The following lines were written by Joseph Rodman 

 Drake in New York in August 1816, and copied from the 

 author's manuscript in January 181 7 by FitzGreene Halleck." 

 The fact that such men as Willis, Poe, Griswold, and Duyck- 

 inck, in writings still readily accessible, give the date of com- 

 position as 18 19, makes the repetition of Halleck on this point 

 worth while. 



Drake's motive for literature was not commercial. Singu- 

 larly enough, the poem existed and was circulated in manu- 

 script only for many years even after Drake's death in 1820. 

 In an issue of the "Weekly Mirror" published in this city 

 in 1828, 1 William Leggett, in a paper on Halleck, speaks of 

 Drake's Culprit Fay as " withheld from the public." Early 

 in 1835 Nathaniel Parker Willis, at the time an attache with 

 the Paris Legation, published a series of four papers on con- 

 temporary American literature in the "Athenaeum" of Lon- 

 don. In the third of these papers, published February 7th, 

 Willis gives the chief place to Drake, and publishes a para- 

 phrase of the poem with selections amounting to 356 lines of 

 the 640 in the original. Willis states that the poem had never 

 been published, and we have Halleck's word to General James 



1 The Weekly Mirror, January 26, 1828. 



