In a life that lasted less than twenty-six years, Edward Coote Pinkney pursued a naval career, practiced law, held a professorship, edited a newspaper, and published enough verse to complete two slim volumes, Rodolph. A Fragment (1823) and Poems (1825). These works and particularly the song "A Health" (1824) led Edgar Allan Poe to declare in "The Poetic Principle" (1848) that had Pinkney "been a New Englander, it is probable that he would have been ranked as the first of American lyrists," but Pinkney's brief life was over before American poetry had advanced beyond the work of William Cullen Bryant in the 1820s. Nevertheless, Pinkney's poems, especially the songs and lyrics, have earned for him an honored niche in the history of Southern and American poetry.

Pinkney was born in London, the seventh child of Maryland parents, William Pinkney, U.S. commissioner and later minister to the Court of St. James, attorney...