Fitz-Greene Halleck - Critical Response

Critical Response

In the mid to late 19th century, Halleck was regarded as one of America's leading poets and had a wide general readership; he was dubbed "the American Byron". Amongst his most well-known poem was "Marco Bozzaris", which Halleck noted was "puffed in a thousand (more or less) magazines and newspapers" in the United States, England, Scotland, and Ireland. Charles Dickens spoke fondly of the "accomplished writer" in a January 1868 letter to William Makepeace Thackeray (as recounted in Thackeray in the United States). It is not clear whether Dickens admired Halleck's poetic skills or his wit and charm, which was often lauded by his contemporaries. Abraham Lincoln was known to occasionally read Halleck's poetry aloud to friends in the White House.

The American writer and critic Edgar Allan Poe reviewed Halleck's poetry collection Alnwick Castle. Regarding Halleck's poem "Fanny", he said, "to uncultivated ears... endurable, but to the practiced versifier it is little less than torture." In the September 1843 issue of Graham's Magazine, Poe wrote that the Halleck "has nearly abandoned the Muses, much to the regret of his friends and to the neglect of his reputation." Poe also wrote, "No name in the American poetical world is more firmly established than that of Fitz-Greene Halleck."

Halleck had several years in which he did not produce any literary works. After his death, poet William Cullen Bryant addressed the New York Historical Society on February 2, 1869, and spoke about this blank period in Halleck's career. He ultimately concluded: "Whatever the reason that Halleck ceased so early to write, let us congratulate ourselves that he wrote at all."

Since the later twentieth century, Halleck's poetry has been studied for its homosexual themes, and for what it reveals about the social world of the nineteenth century.