Lane Cooper sitting at a desk, reading a document, via Cornell University’s Rare and Manuscript Collections Images
Lane Cooper has long been an important figure in my life, even though I never met this Cornell University English professor, who died in 1959 at the age of 84. Today, if Cooper is remembered at all, it is probably for his amplified English versions of Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric—both still commonly met with in used book stores. But to me he represents the kind of humanistic scholar and teacher that I’ve always admired and once aspired to become.
Most of Cooper’s books are devoted to encouraging students to make the classics a central part of their intellectual lives. To this end, he wrote articles about education, translated Plato and Aristotle, compiled an anthology of essays called Methods and Aims in the Study of Literature, and published the outlines and syllabi for his own college courses on Dante, Chaucer, literary criticism, and the classics in translation. Cooper was the sort of committed educator who could produce a pamphlet entitled Literature for Engineers, yet turn around and eviscerate shoddy scholarship as unsparingly as A. E. Housman in a bad mood. In an excoriating review of Anna Robeson Burr’s book The Autobiography, Cooper concluded with these sentences: “A word must be added on her style, which is generally diffuse, at times muddy, and often pretentious; and on her Index, which is untrustworthy; see, for example, the second,
