Fleeting fame

New York Journal | Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Robert Burns, and ... who? | Marvin Olasky

If you believed in betting, you'd never lose (up to now) by asking the name of the American poet whose statue sits on the "Literary Walk" of New York's Central Park. It's not Longfellow, Whitman, or Robert Frost. It's . . .

"Would you like some information about Fitz-Greene Halleck?" asked Kenan Minkoff of each passerby on the afternoon of July 8, the birthday (in 1790) of the man once dubbed "the American Byron."

"No."

"No thanks."

But about every third person asked, "Who was he?" Then Minkoff, a New York playwright who had decorated Halleck's statue with daisies, would talk about the man of whom Edgar Allen Poe wrote, "No name in the American poetical world is more firmly established than that of Fitz-Green Halleck."