SOURCE: "The Case of Drake and Halleck," in Early American Literature, Vol. VIII, No. 3, Winter, 1974, pp. 285-97.

In the following excerpt from an article on Halleck and Drake, Slater discusses Halleck'spoem Fanny and argues that Halleck's poems and those of other popular but relatively minor figures should not be excluded from literary study.

Sixty years ago they were still being called the Damon and Pythias of American poetry: a young Park Row physician, dead of tuberculosis at twenty-five, and a young South Street accountant, who wrote the epitaph that was chiseled into his friend's gravestone. Before that, they had been known, in the touching provincialism of the early nineteenth century, as the American Keats and the American Byron. Now their books are shelved, unborrowed, with those of Gulian Verplanck. Even their sonorous names, Joseph Rodman Drake and Fitz-Greene Halleck, are blurred in the memory and their identities confused...