Philip Pendleton Cooke

Cooke was born on October 26, 1816,[1] in Martinsburg when it was then part of Virginia to the former Maria Pendleton and her husband, planter and delegate John R. Cooke (1788-1854).[2] He was thus descended from the First Families of Virginia. Of the large (13 child family), his younger brother John Esten Cooke would become a minor novelist as well as lawyer, then a Confederate officer during the American Civil War while his cousin Philip St. George Cooke became a Union officers.[3] Much earlier, the Cooke brothers received a private education appropriate to their class. Philip attended Princeton University, and graduated in 1834.

Cooke spent the majority of his life in the northern part of the Shenandoah Valley.[4] At Princeton, Cooke wrote the poems "Song of the Sioux Lovers," "Autumn," and "Historical Ballads, No. 6 Persian: Dhu Nowas," as well as a short story, "The Consumptive" before graduation.[5] Admitted to the Virginia bar, Cooke followed in his father's profession as a lawyer. His two main hobbies, however, were hunting and writing, though he never made a profession out of his writing.[1] He once wrote: "I detest the law. On the other hand, I love the fever-fits of composition."[6] Cooke lived for a time at Saratoga, the former home of Daniel Morgan.[7]

Cooke died January 20, 1850.[1]

Cooke believed his literary sustenance came from his library rather than from writing, despite several important literary figures — including John P. Kennedy and Rufus Wilmot Griswold — who encouraged him to write more. Edgar Allan Poe praised his work and wrote to him that he would "give your contributions a hearty welcome, and the choicest position in the magazine."[8] By 1835, he resolved to give up on poetry entirely.[9] He believed that poetry was as barren "as a worn-out tobacco field" and that even William Cullen Bryant, who he considered "the master of them all," had "sheltered himself from starvation behind the columns of a political newspaper" rather than making money from poetry.[10] By 1847, the Southern Literary Messenger reported that Cooke had turned into a prose writer.[11]

Cooke was well-read and his poetry was inspired by Edmund Spenser, Geoffrey Chaucer and Dante Aligheri.[12] He also admired the prose work of Poe, which he told in a letter:

I have always found some remarkable thing in your stories to haunt me long after reading them. The teeth in Berenice—the changing eyes of Morella—that red & glaring crack in the House of Usher—the pores of the deck in the MS. Found in a Bottle—the visible drops falling into the goblet in Ligeia.[13]

• Philip Pendleton Cooke (1816–1850) at Encyclopedia Virginia
• Froissart Ballads: and Other Poems at the Internet Archive