Joseph Rodman Drake

Joseph Rodman Drake (1795–1820) was an American poet born in New York City. Orphaned young, he studied medicine at Columbia College and married Sarah Eckford in 1816. He became a close friend of the poet Fitz-Greene Halleck, and the two wrote the satirical Croaker verses for the New York Evening Post in 1819.

His fairy poem The Culprit Fay, written in 1819, drew on the scenery of the Hudson Highlands. He died of consumption in 1820, aged twenty-five. His collected poems were published posthumously in 1835 by his daughter, and the 1836 edition is the source of this selection; Halleck's elegy for him, "Green be the turf above thee", is among the best remembered American elegies.