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. |
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... social circles . Privately , he had begun a series of erratic romances with foreign men , but these did not eclipse ... social commentaries . An over- night sensation , their Croaker poems initiated a form of social dialogue ...
... Social constructionist essays , for example , David M. Halperin's " Sex before Sexuality , " and essentialist counterarguments , such as John Boswell's " Revolutions , Universals , and Sexual Categories , " can only agree that it is ...
... social approval . Thus Croaker was not only an appro- priate pen name for Drake and Halleck on a personal level but also made sense for their public lines , which imitated Goldsmith's parody of high literature and social hypocrisy ...