Poetical Works

Fitz-Greene Halleck helped invent American poetry. Born in coastal Connecticut, he spent four decades navigating Wall Street before returning home to die among his books. This collection gathers the work of a man who wrote one of the most famous elegies in American literature, a tribute to his friend Joseph Rodman Drake that still aches two centuries later. It also contains "Marco Bozzaris," the romantic battle hymn that made him a celebrity, and "Connecticut," the quiet meditation on home he wrote in his final years. Halleck was among the first American poets anthologized, a poet who absorbed British Romanticism and transformed it into something our young nation could claim as its own. His satirical "Fanny" shows a sharper wit than the patriotic verses suggest. Reading Halleck means encountering the raw, ambitious early days of American literature, when poets were still figuring out what this country's voice might sound like. He was not the greatest American poet, but he was among the first to try.