Along with Waitman T. Barbe and Danske Dandridge, English was considered a major West Virginia poet of the mid 19th century.

English wrote scores of poems and plays as well as stories and novels, but his reputation as a writer was built on the ballad "Ben Bolt" (1843).

[5] Written for Nathaniel Parker Willis's New-York Mirror, it was turned into a song and became very popular, with a ship, steamboat and racehorse soon named in its honor.

[6] American opera singer Eleonora de Cisneros recorded this on an Edison Blue Amberol cylinder in 1912.

[7][8] Other works include the temperance novel Walter Woolfe, or the Doom of the Drinker in 1842 and the political romance MDCCCXLII.

Poe, who claimed he had already returned the letters, asked English for a pistol to defend himself from Ellet's infuriated brother.

[14] Later that year, Poe harshly criticized English's work as part of his "Literati of New York" series published in Godey's Lady's Book, referring to him as "a man without the commonest school education busying himself in attempts to instruct mankind in topics of literature".

It included a character named Marmaduke Hammerhead, the famous author of The Black Crow, who uses phrases like "Nevermore" and "lost Lenore."