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Albert Spaulding Cook

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ALBERT SPAULDING COOK (born October 28, 1925, Exeter, NH; died July 7, 1998; Providence, RI) was a notable American literary critic, poet, classical scholar, teacher and translator. He taught Classics, English and Comparative Literature at the University of California (Berkeley), Western Reserve, the University at Buffalo and Brown University, as well as at various universities abroad.

EARLY LIFE

Though born in New Hampshire, he spent most of his early childhood in Ohio and in Massachusetts. In the late 1930s, his family moved to Albany and in 1940 settled in Utica, New York. His parents separated when he was fourteen, his mother at first remaining in Utica and later moving to New York City, and his father moving to Boston. A brother, two years his junior, pursued a career in radio.

EDUCATION

While in high school, Albert Cook ran the school’s literary magazine, won an Atlantic Monthly student essay prize, and edited an anthology of Utica area poets. Some of his schoolmates, among them Aaron Rosen and Edwin Dolin, remained life-long friends and collaborators; another, Carol Rubin, eventually became his wife. A gifted linguist from his earliest years, he learned Latin and taught himself Greek in high school; by the time he reached college, he was proficient also in French and German; he later added Hebrew and Russian. At the peak of his career, he spoke four languages and could read ten. In 1943 he enrolled in Harvard College, where John Hawkes and Robert Creeley were among his classmates. His formal studies were chiefly in classics, with Arthur Darby Nock, Werner Jaeger and (above all) John Finley among his teachers. (Finley eventually recommended him for admission to the Harvard Society of Fellows.) He interrupted his undergraduate career in 1943-1944 with a brief stint in the armed services, but was discharged for health reasons after six months. In his senior year, he was awarded the Garrison Prize (Harvard’s highest award for a poem by an undergraduate), as well as the Bowdoin Prize in Classical Greek and Latin and the John Osborne Sargent Prize for Latin Translation. He also published various poems under the pen-name of “Charles Hamilton Sorley”. At his Harvard graduation in 1946, he delivered the Latin commencement oration. Rather than proceeding immediately to graduate school, he lived for some months in poverty in the village of Sainte-Rose near Montreal, where he perfected his French and began drafting a series of works, including his first book, The Dark Voyage and the Golden Mean, which was to launch his career. He at this time also experienced a religious awakening which led to his conversion from liberal agnosticism to Anglican Christianity. He returned to Harvard to complete his Master’s degree, chiefly under the mentorship of the renowned classicist Eric Havelock, and continued as a Harvard Junior Fellow, envisioning an eventual career outside academe as a lone wolf writer of poetry, drama and fiction. A prominent member of a dissident group of young Harvard writers that included L.I. Sissman, Norman Wexler and Richard Wilbur, he founded the little magazine Halcyon (1947-1948), publishing work by himself and his friends alongside contributions from Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, Allen Ginsberg and e.e. cummings. He also began working with Boston’s Tributary Theater, which staged his translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. In a revised form, this version of the play was several times republished in later years. Elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows, Cook continued to work on a variety of projects, and began publishing work in The Partisan Review. He married Carol S. Rubin on June 19, 1948 and in the following spring took up residence on a Junior Fellow Study Grant in the Saint-Germain neighborhood of Paris. While in France, Cook attended lectures by Merleau-Ponty, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan. His three sons were born in the years following his return and in 1951 the family moved to New York City. Still determined to become an independent writer and reluctant to commit to an academic career, Cook supported himself and his family by various odd jobs, from encyclopedia salesman to museum accountant, until fiscal rescue arrived once more in the form of a Fulbright grant to France.

SCHOLARLY CAREER

Financial necessity finally persuaded him to accept the offer of a teaching position in the University of California at Berkeley. Told early on that his contract would not be renewed, he spent the remaining time of his teaching stint in learning Hebrew, before securing another Fulbright Fellowship, this time to Munich. When the Fulbright grant ended a year later, he accepted the offer of an appointment at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. By this time, his works of criticism had gained a substantial reputation; also, his first volume of verse was published by the University of Arizona Press, and several of his plays were performed by experimental theaters in Cleveland and elsewhere. Two years later he was appointed Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science at Stanford. Meanwhile, in 1963, he assumed the chairmanship of the English Department in the University at Buffalo, a formerly private university which had just then become a flagship research institution of the State University of New York. His mandate was to substantially expand the Buffalo English department (it increased from fifty to almost eighty members in the first five years of his tenure) and to turn it into a cutting-edge, world-class literary institution. He was given free hand to hire and fire, and to bend or break conventional academic rules at his discretion. He used this freedom not only to hire a hugely distinguished faculty (Lionel Abel, C.L. Barber, John Barth, Robert Creeley, Carl Dennis, Irving Feldman, Leslie Fiedler, René Girard, Mac Hammond, Norman Holland, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Bruce Jackson, John Logan, Ann London Scott, Charles Olson, Bill Sylvester and Dorothy Van Ghent all joined the faculty during his watch), but also to democratize the department by encouraging the breach of conventional barriers among period specialties, or between creative and scholarly, young and old, tenured and untenured, and even teachers and students. His presence was especially strong during the two sensational Buffalo Festivals of the Arts in 1965 and 1967, transpiring during a politically and ideologically explosive decade. When a more conservative University administration took over (and the budget began to be squeezed) he continued to give generous support to academically adventurous initiatives that benefited a younger generation of faculty and graduate students destined for distinguished later careers (Robert Hass, John Coetzee, Charles Baxter, Marc Schell, Carol Jacobs, Gerald O’Grady). His reformation of the Buffalo English Department was viewed by many as the single greatest achievement of his career. However, by the late 1970s, increasingly sidelined by an unsympathetic new University administration and hampered by tightening fiscal restraints, he accepted the offer of a distinguished professorship at Brown University, where he taught until his retirement in 1988. As an Emeritus, he kept energetically publishing and guest-lecturing until his sudden death of a heart attack a decade later.  

ACADEMIC POSITIONS AND HONORS

PUBLISHED WORKS

(1) CRITICISM AND LITERARY THEORY

  • The Dark Voyage and the Golden Mean: A Philosophy of Comedy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949; reprinted by W.W. Norton, 1966) <LC: PN19222.C6>
  • The Meaning of Fiction (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1960) <LC: PN3451.C6>
  • The Classic Line: A Study in Epic Poetry (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1966) <ISBN: 1112748121>
  • Prisms: Studies in Modern Literature (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1967) <LC: PN771.C6>
  • The Root of the Thing: A Study of Job and the Song of Songs' (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1968)
  • Enactment: Greek Tragedy (Chicago, IL: Swallow Press, 1971) <ISBN: 0504005397>
  • Shakespeare’s Enactment: The Dynamics of Renaissance Theater (Chicago, IL: Swallow Press, 1976) <ISBN: 0804006954>
  • Myth and Language (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1980) <ISBN: 0253140277>
  • French Tragedy: The Power of Enactment (Chicago, IL: Swallow Press, 1981) <ISBN: 0804005486>
  • Changing the Signs: The Fifteenth Century Breakthrough (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1985) <ISBN: 0803214251>
  • Figural Choice in Poetry and Art (Hanover, NH: Brown University Press, 1985) <ISBN: 9780874513332]
  • Thresholds, a Study of Some Aspects of Romanticism (Reading, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985) <ISBN: 0299103005>
  • History/writing (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1988) <ISBN: 0521360498>
  • Dimensions of the Sign in Art (Hanover, NH: Brown University Press, 1989) <ISBN: 08784514487>
  • Soundings: On Shakespeare, Modern Poetry, Plato and Other Subjects (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991) <ISBN: 0814323316>
  • Canons and Wisdoms (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993) <ISBN: 0812232046>
  • The Reach of Poetry (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press) <ISBN: 9781557530691>
  • The Burden of Prophecy: Poetic Utterance and the Prophets of the Old Testament (Carbondale, IL: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1996) <ISBN: 0809320835>
  • The Stance of Plato (Lanham, MD: Littlefield Adams, 1996) <ISBN: 0822630494>
  • Temporalizing Space: The Triumphant Strategies of Piero della Francesca (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 1992) <ISBN: 082041865X>

(2) POETRY

  • Progressions (Phoenix, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 1963)
  • The Charges (Chicago, IL: The Swallow Press, 1970, reprinted 1972)
  • Adapt the Living (Chicago, IL: The Swallow Press, 1981) <ISBN: 0804003505>
  • Modulars: Poems on a New Metrical Principle (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Poetry Press, 1992)
  • Delayed Answers (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Poetry Press, 1992)
  • Modes (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Poetry Press, 1993) <ISBN: 0773427880>
  • Affability Blues (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Poetry Press, 1994) <ISBN: 0773427996>
  • Reasons for Waking (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Poetry Press, 1996, 2nd ed. 1998)
  • The Future Invests (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Poetry Press, 1997)
  • Haiku (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Poetry Press, 1997)
  • A Sometime Master (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellon Poetry Press, 1998) <ISBN: 9780773430921>
  • Flashpoints (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Poetry Press, 2000) <ISBN: 0773427120>
  • Cook published numerous poems in journals including ''Alaska Quarterly Review'', Art and Literature, Audience: A Quarterly of Literature and the Arts, Audit, Brown Classical Journal, Canto, Centennial Review, Chelsea, Circle Review, Colorado Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, Eröffnungen (Vienna), Epoch, Inscape, Interim, Jeopardy, Massachusetts Review, New Directions, New Leaves Review, Partisan Review, Perspective, Poetry (Chicago), ''Poetry Northwest'', Polemic, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly Review of Literature, Sagetrieb, Slant, Tiger’s Eye and others.
  • Selected poems from Modulars, Delayed Answers, Modes and Affability Blues appeared in: Peter Baker (ed.), Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics (New York: Peter Lang, 1996)
  • The Library of Congress has a recording of Albert Cook reading from his work, April 22, 1960 <LC Catalog No. LWO 3091>; a recording of another reading on April 26, 1978, is preserved in the Poetry Collection of the University at Buffalo libraries <http://catalog.lib.buffalo.edu.gate.lib.buffalo.edu/vufind/Record/003324215>

(3) FICTION

  • “The Sundering,” Partisan Review (September 1949), pp. 916-20.


(4) DRAMA

(5) TRANSLATIONS

  • Homer, Odyssey: A Verse Translation (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1967); republished as The Odyssey: A Norton Critical Edition (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1972) <ISBN: 0393964051>
  • Sophocles, Oedipus Rex in: Ten Greek Plays (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1957); republished in Reading for Pleasure (Prentice-Hall, 1960); also in Oedipus Rex: A Mirror for Greek Drama (San Francisco 1963); as Oedipus Rex (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1982); and in Greek Tragedy: An Anthology (Wayne State University Press, revised ed., 1993)
  • (with Pamela Perkins) The Burden of Sufferance: Russian Women Poets (New York, NY: Garland, 1993 <ISBN: 0824033256>

(6) SELECTED ARTICLES IN JOURNALS

  • “Metaphysical Poetry and Measure for Measure,” Accent 13:2 (Spring 1953), pp. 122-27.
  • “The Unity of War and Peace,” Western Review 22:4 (Summer 1958), pp. 243-55.
  • “Proust: The Invisible Stilts of Time,” Modern Fiction Studies 4:2 (Summer 1958), pp. 118-26.
  • “Stendhal’s Irony,” Essays in Criticism 8:4 (October 1958), pp. 355-69.
  • “Flaubert: The Riches of Detachment,” The French Review 32:2 (December 1958), pp. 120-29.
  • “Modern Verse: Diffusion as a Principle of Composition,” The Kenyon Review 21:2 (Spring 1959), pp. 199-220.
  • “The Beginning of Fiction: Cervantes,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 17:4 (June 1959), pp. 463-72.
  • “Milton’s Abstract Music,” University of Toronto Quarterly 29 (1959-1960), pp. 370-85.
  • “Reflexive Attitudes: Sterne, Gogol, Gide,” Criticism 2:2 (Spring 1960), pp. 164 ff.
  • “The Merit of Spengler,” The Centennial Review 7:3 (Summer 1963), pp. 306-16.
  • “Language and Action in the Drama,” College English 28:1 (October 1966), pp. 15-25.
  • “Die Einheit des Selbstbewusstseins in den Cantos” in: Eva Hesse (ed.), Ezra Pound: 22 Versuche über einen Dichter (Frankfurt: Athenäum Verlag, 1967)
  • “The Patterning Effect in Sophocles’ Philoctetes,” Arethusa 1:1 (Fall 1968), pp. 82-93.
  • “Rhythm and Person in the Cantos” in: Eva Hesse (ed.), New Approaches to Ezra Pound (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969 and London: Faber & Faber, 1970)
  • “Blake’s Milton,” Costerus: Essays in English and American Literature 6 (Amsterdam, 1972), pp. 27-33.
  • “Levi-Strauss and Myth: A Review of Mythologiques,” Modern Language Notes 91:4 (Fall 1975), pp. 1099-1116.
  • “Herodotus: The Act of Inquiry as a Liberation from Myth,” Helios 3 (New Series, May 1976), pp. 23-66.
  • “Language and Myth,” Boundary2 5:3 (Spring 1977), ppp. 653-78.
  • “The Moment of Nietzsche,” Carleton Germanic Papers No. 7 (1979), pp. 1-25.
  • “Leopardi: the Mastery of Diffusing Sorrow,” Canadian Journal of Italian Studies 4:1-2 (Fall-Winter 1980-81), pp. 68-82.
  • “Thought, Image, and Story: The Slippery Procedures of Literature,” Comparative Literature Studies 18:3 (September 1981), pp. 272-77.
  • “Carpaccio’s Animals,” The Centennial Review 27:4 (Fall 1983), pp. 224-43)
  • “Aspects of the Plastic Image: Pound and Arp,” Dada/Surrealism 12 (Fall 1983), pp. 37-47.
  • “Visual Aspects of the Homeric Simile in Indo-European Context,” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 17:2, N.S. (1984), pp. 39-59.
  • “The Presence of Botticelli’s Primavera,” Stanford Italian Review 4:11 (Spring 1984), pp. 55-72.
  • “Change of Signification in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights,” Oud Holland 98:2 (1984), pp. 76-97.
  • “Marcel Duchamp’s Modification of Surrealism,” Stanford Literary Review 2:2 (Fall 1985), pp. 127-45.
  • “Expressionism Not Wholly Abstract: John Ashbery,” American Poetry 2:2 (Winter 1985), pp. 53-70.
  • “Dialectic, Irony, and Myth in Plato’s Phaedrus,” American Journal of Philology 106 (1985), pp. 427-41.
  • “Reference and Rhetoric in Historiography” in: R. Fleming and R. Payne (edd.), Bucknell Review, Criticism, History and Intertextuality (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1988), pp. 159-81.
  • “Seven Pillars of Wisdom: Turns and Counter-Turns” in: Jeffrey Meyers (ed.), T.E. Lawrence: Soldier, Writer, Legend (London: Macmillan Press, 1989), pp. 87-109.
  • “Projections of Measure: The Continued Synergies of Pound and Williams,” Arizona Quarterly 95:2 (Summer 1989), pp. 35-61.
  • “Heidegger and the Wisdom of Poetry,” Centennial Review 34:4 (Summer 1990), pp. 349-80.
  • “Equanimity and Danger: Distributions of Questions and Style of Confrontation in the Four Dialogues around Socrates’ Trial,” Arethusa 23 (Fall 1990), pp. 1-32
  • “Space and Culture,” New Literary History 29:3 (Summer 1998)

(7) COMPILATIONS AND ANTHOLOGIES

  • (with Edwin Dolin) Anthology of Greek Tragedy (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Library of Literature, 1972) <ISBN: 0882142151>
  • Peter Baker, Sarah Webster Goodwin, and Gary Handwerk (eds.), The Scope of Words (New York: Peter Lang, 1991)—a miscellany of essays and tributes, with a poem dedicated to Cook by Robert Creeley <ISBN: 0820414174>
  • Peter Baker (ed.), Forces in Modern and Post-Modern Poetry (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2008) <ISBN: 0820451347>

References

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