Worldly, ironic, elegant, she would lean against the blackboard, pausing her lectures only to take a drag on her long ivory cigarette holder. Mary Ann Radzinowicz was a far cry from John Cooke. In 1968 there was only one woman with a permanent position in the English department, but a visitor from Cambridge University was offering a Milton course with a daunting reading list: all of the major poems, most of the shorter poems, and a very large sampler of Milton’s prose writings. But in graduate school at the University of Virginia I decided to make one last try. I left college still innocent of Miltonic knowledge. There were, of course, no mountains convenient to Kansas City. You must climb a mountain and read it all aloud, from morn to dewy eve.” A smile started to lift the corners of his pursed lips. Crossley, there is only one way to read Paradise Lost. ![]() Crossley, have you not?” I confessed that I had tried twice to read selections, most recently in a course on Renaissance poetry, but that I had given up and found the poem impenetrable. I must have had a conspicuously blank look on my face because he rapped that cane and growled, “You have read Paradise Lost, Mr. Who were my favored composers? Had I been to see the Caravaggio at the Nelson Gallery? And once, while trying to illustrate classical rhetorical devices like chiasmus and aposiopesis, he cited examples in English from Milton. Cooke sometimes grilled me on the larger, and often missing, dimensions of my education. Our one-hour tutorial often ran overtime as he would follow the recitation with an impromptu lecture on anything from Greek battle gear to ancient substitutes for toilet paper (shards of pottery!). Whenever I made a particularly egregious error in my translation, he would wince and thump the cane impatiently two or three times. For three years at Rockhurst College in Kansas City I was his only student in ancient Greek, and “class” met in his office where he would sit in a straight-backed chair, leaning forward on his cane centered between his spread legs and peering intently at the desk where I sat, just a couple of feet away, reading and translating. Ivory-haired, thin but potbellied, with thick glasses that magnified his eyes and a hearing aid that he was constantly adjusting, he had all the credentials of advanced years-but it was the cane that unmistakably broadcast elderliness. John Cooke looked older than he probably was. My Ever New Delight: The Pleasures of Paradise Lost
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