Background
He was graduated in 1872 from Rutgers College, and from 1877 to 1878 he studied English at GöttingenGottingen and Leipzig. Returning from Germany, Cook organized the English department at Johns Hopkins University, which had been recently founded. In 1881 and 1882 he again studied abroad, first in London with Henry Sweet, and then with Eduard Sievers in Jena, where in 1882 he received his doctoral degree. From 1882 to 1889 he was professor of English at the University of California. From 1889 until his retirement in 1921 he served at Yale as professor of English language and literature. He died in New Haven, Conn., on Sept. 1, 1927.
Cook published more than 300 works. In his principal field of research, Old English, among his most important publications were his translation and adaptation of Sievers' Old English Grammar (1885), his own First Book in Old English (1894), and his editions of the poems Judith (1888), Christ (1900), Dream of the Rood (1905), Elene, Phoenix, and Physiologus (these three in one volume, 1919). Another constant interest is represented by his school editions of treatises on the art of poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sir Philip Sidney, J. H. Newman, Horace, Marco Girolamo Vida, Boileau, Joseph Addison, and Leigh Hunt. Besides his own published work, he founded the Concordance Society to further the publishing of valuable concordances, and was the founder and first editor of the series of monographs called Yale Studies in English.
