Albert Spaulding Cook
Albert Spaulding Cook (October 28, 1925 – July 7, 1998) was a noted 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 Born in Exeter, New Hampshire, Cook spent much 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 lifelong 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 group of young Harvard writers that included L. E. Sissman, Norman Wexler and Richard Wilbur, he founded the little magazine