Joseph Rodman Drake

Joseph Rodman Drake 1795-1820, American poet and satirist, b. New York City. Under the name "The Croakers," he and his friend Fitz-Greene Halleck wrote a series of light satirical verses for the New York Evening Post (1819, first complete ed. 1860). Drake's longest serious poem is "The Culprit Fay" (in The Culprit Fay and Other Poems, 1835); his poem "The American Flag" was long a standard patriotic declamation. Halleck's elegy beginning, "Green be the turf above thee," was written upon Drake's death.

Bibliography: See F. L. Pleadwell, ed., The Life and Works of Joseph Rodman Drake (1935).

Drake, Joseph Rodman (1795–1820),born in New York City, studied medicine and, after a trip abroad, ran a drugstore for a year prior to his early death from consumption. His only writing published during his lifetime was the “Croaker Papers,” satirical verses written with his friend Fitz‐Greene Halleck. On his deathbed, Drake instructed his wife to destroy the manuscript of his trifles in rhyme, but the work was preserved, and in 1835 a selection was published as The Culprit Fay and Other Poems. Of these, the best known are the title poem and The American Flag, an effusively patriotic lyric first unfurled in the Croaker series. Drake was an early member of the Knickerbocker Group, whose pretensions to fame were riddled by Poe's devasting reviews in The Literati, but he received a compensating tribute from Halleck, whose poem On the Death of Joseph Rodman Drake is considered to be one of the finest elegies in American literature. Drake's Works were collected in 1935.