Edward Coate Pinkney was born in London in October, 1802, while his father was there as United States Commissioner under the Jay treaty. He was educated at St. Marys College, Baltimore, and entered the navy as a midshipman. But at the age of twenty-two he resigned his commission, and studied law. In 1826 he accepted a professorship in the University of Maryland, and in 1827 the editorship of the Marylander, a political journal. Ill health soon compelled him to resign the latter, and he died on the 11th of April, 1828. His only volume was Rodolph, and other Poems, published anonymously in Baltimore in 1825. It is included in Morris and Williss Mirror Library, with a biographical sketch by William Leggett.
Personal
I knew Pinkney slightly. He was a very handsome man, punctilious to a fault, wayward, and Byronic, chivalrous and enthusiastic
. I have always thought him the most original of our Poets.
General
Rich in beauties of a peculiar nature, [Poems] and not surpassed by productions of a similar character in the English language.
Rodolph is his longest work. It was first published, anonymously, soon after he left the navy, and was probably written while he was in the Mediterranean . There is no novelty in the story, and not much can be said for its morality . It has more faults than Pinkneys other works; in many passages it is obscure; its beauty is marred by the use of obsolete words; and the author seems to delight in drawing his comparisons from the least known portions of ancient literature. Some of his lighter pieces are very beautiful. A Health, The Picture-Song, and A Serenade, have not often been equalled . Pinkneys is the first instance in this country in which we have to lament the prostitution of true poetical genius to unworthy purposes. Pervading much that he wrote there is a selfish melancholy and sullen pride; dissatisfaction with the present, and doubts in regard to the future life.
The poem just cited [A Health] is especially beautiful; but the poetic elevation which it induces we must refer chiefly to our sympathy in the poets enthusiasm. We pardon his hyperboles for the evident earnestness with which they are uttered.
The small volume of poems, sufficiently large to preserve his memory with all generous appreciators of true poetry as a writer of exquisite taste and susceptibility, appeared in Baltimore in 1825. It contained Rodolph, a Fragment, which had previously been printed anonymously for the authors friends. It is a powerful sketch of a broken life of passion and remorse, of a husband slain by the lover of his wife, of her early death in a convent, and of the paramours wanderings and wild mental anticipations. Though a fragment, wanting in fulness of design and the last polish of execution, it is a poem of power and mark. There is an occasional inner music in the lines, demonstrative of the true poet. The imagery is happy and original, evidently derived from objects which the writer had seen in the impressible youth of his voyages in the navy.
Trilled his airy love-lyrics like a descendant of some seventeenth-century cavalier.