78 



This paraphrase has served two purposes; it has given the 

 story, and it has revealed to you something of the quality of 

 the poem. Contemporary criticism of the work, seldom very 

 well balanced, ran in general to consummate laudation. Hal- 

 leck said of it : " It is certainly the best thing of the kind in 

 the English language, and is more strikingly original than T 

 had supposed it possible for a modern poem to be." But that 

 was the language of enthusiastic friendship. Knowledge of 

 this poem as well as of the "Croaker" poems may have been 

 in the mind of Coleman, the editor of the "Evening Post" 

 when he exclaimed on meeting Drake and Halleck, " My God ! 

 I had no idea that we had such talents in America ! " The 

 writer of a criticism in the "American Monthly Review" for 

 September, 1835, comments upon the newly published poem 

 more specifically ; but with hardly less glowing emotions : " For 

 luxuriance of fancy, for delicacy of expression, for glowing 

 imagery, and for poetic truth, it is rivalled by no poem that has 

 appeared upon this side of the Atlantic. Our author . . . 

 studied nature — studied her not as she appeared in books . . . 

 he studied her in her own virgin retreats, by the mighty rivers 

 and mossy forests of his own fresh land. ... Its whole 

 atmosphere is American. It is a fairy tale of our clime, and 

 its imagery and accessories are applicable to no other beneath 

 the sun." H. L. Tuckerman is said to have declared that The 

 Culprit Fay is superior to any " fanciful poem " by Moore or 

 Shelley. 4 Some called Drake the American Keats. 



In much of this comment it is easy to see the habit of ex- 

 uberant and assertive over-praise which America has not even 

 yet outgrown. It is a fault of youth which has not yet learned 

 to measure its freedom. Not many years before The Culprit 

 Fay was published, the " Quarterly " had made its famous re- 

 mark "Who reads an American book?" And the next gen- 

 eration of American critics rallied resentfully to the defence 

 of every new American book, for the most part not wisely but 



4 Recollections of Men, Women and Things by A. Oakey Hall; pub. in 

 Truth, Oct. 14, 1883. 



