The American Byron: Homosexuality and the Fall of Fitz-Greene HalleckHailed in the mid-nineteenth century as the most important American poet of the period, Fitz-Greene Halleck was a close friend of William C. Bryant, an associate of Charles Dickens and Washington Irving, and a celebrity sought out by John Jacob Astor and American presidents. Halleck, an attractive man of wit and charm, was dubbed "the American Byron" because he both employed similar poetic strategies and challenged the most sacred institutions of his day. A large general readership enjoyed his verse, though it was infused with homosexual themes. Indeed, Halleck's love for another man would be fictionalized in Bayard Taylor's novel Joseph and His Friend a century before the Stonewall riots. |
From inside the book
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... civil law as Puritan fathers increased the pressure on sodomites . John Cotton's 1636 legal code against sodomy relied upon the English civil code , but Massachu- setts Bay colonists chose Nathaniel Ward's legislation that invoked Scrip ...
... Civil War . The North could not compete with the price of British goods and resented the South's profit- able trade with England . Outraged by British attacks on American ships and the capture of American seamen to fight the French in ...
... civil contradic- tions regarding personal freedom and sexuality . The New York of 1846 was starting to look like the Guilford of 1646 , the year of William Plaine's sodomy trial . Exactly one year to the date of the founding of the New ...