John Parke was born on April 7, 1754 in Dover, Delaware, United States. He was the son of Thomas and Ann Parke. Thomas Parke was a well-to-do citizen, a hat-maker by trade and sheriff of Kent County, 1758 - 1760. He died in 1766, leaving, besides his widow, who apparently did not long survive him, at least three children.
Education
John Parke attended Newark Academy and Newark College, which became the University of Delaware, and then was a student at the College of Philadelphia, forerunner of the University of Pennsylvania, where he received the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1771 and that of Master of Arts in 1775. After graduation he studied law with Thomas McKean for some four years.
Career
On August 1775, recommended by McKean and Caesar Rodney, John Parke was appointed assistant quartermaster-general of the Continental Army at Cambridge, Massachussets, and on June 29, 1776, in New York, was appointed lieutenant-colonel of artificers. He resigned from the army, October 29, 1778, and died on his estate, "Poplar Grove, " in Kent County, Delaware, eleven years later. Parke published work anonymously in Philadelphia in 1786, entitled The Lyric Works of Horace, Translated into English Verse: to Which Are Added, a Number of Original Poems, by a Native of America. The printer of this work, Eleazer Oswald, was one of Parke's comrades in the army, also a lieutenant-colonel, who had set up as a bookseller "at the Coffee House" in 1786. In the volume Parke included translations from other classical poets than Horace and both original poems and translations by other hands than his own. Some of the versions of Horace are really paraphrases which adapt the subject matter to the circumstances of American history, substituting George Washington for the Emperor Augustus.
Most of the poems are supplied with dedications and notes of the date and place of writing. These notations indicate that some of the translations were made in 1769 - 1770 at college, that in 1772 Parke had made a journey to Hartford, Connecticut, and that he was at Valley Forge. Together with land records in which he is mentioned they show that his residence after his retirement from the army was Arundel in Murderkill Hundred, a few miles from Dover. The poet included in his volume, besides a life of Horace, which he addressed to Benjamin Franklin, and his own version of the odes, a pastoral by John Wilcocks, whom he described as "late an officer of the British Army, my most intimate friend and acquaintance, " and whose death in 1772 he commemorated in an elegy; poems by Mr. John Pryor, "a young gentleman of Dover"; and translations written between 1720 and 1730 by David French, Esquire, late of the Delaware Counties.
The versification is in the manner of Pope, whom Parke greatly admired, and whose translations he sometimes adopted, with acknowledgment, when his own seemed inadequate. Bound in the same volume is Virginia: a Pastoral Drama, on the Birthday of an Illustrious Personage and the Return of Peace, February 11, 1784, addressed to John Dickinson. The illustrious personage is obviously Washington, and the scene of the action Mount Vernon. Parke is said to have written original poems and satires, including a comedy representing the petty administration of justice, but these are not extant. The dedication of an ode "To My German Flute, Dover, 1770" and another "On Hearing Miss Kitty Smith Play and Sing to the Guitar, Philadelphia, 1771" would seem to indicate in the poet at least some taste for music. John Parke died on December 11, 1789.