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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... woman ( possibly Hal- leck's sister and lifelong confidant ) for her " tear of pity " and " sympa- thetic sigh " as she tries to " teach me to blunt Affection's dart . " The dart conjures up the preserved epistle to Menie , which was ...
... Woman never yet refused Virtues to a seeming wooer- Woman never yet abused Him who had been civil to her.23 The seeming suitor knows that the pretense of heterosexual interest suffi- ciently meets the social requirement . In another ...
... woman cloaked behind the name Fanny because Halleck's heroine caricatured a man , Drake . The snares of feminine false beauty and masculine material- ism replace virtue and chivalry in Fanny's irreverent battle of the sexes . While ...