Matt Flumerfelt
By Matt Flumerfelt
The Valdosta Daily Times
Syndicated columnist Dick Yarbrough recently called Raymond Cook one of the three wise men who profoundly influenced his life. In a 1999 article, Yarbrough explained how “one fateful day” during his sophomore year at Georgia State University, he accepted the challenge Cook issued to his literature class of analyzing the poem “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer.
During his exposition, Yarbrough said he proclaimed “Trees” to be “one of the world’s great poems.” He said the normally “kind and gentle” Cook took him to task for his lack of preparation and questionable analytical skills, and advised Yarbrough to “always think before you speak.”
“Ray Cook taught me that talking is best done only after a good deal of thinking,” Yarbrough wrote. “It may have been the best advice I ever received.”
Cook’s method of starting to read a poem from the textbook and, “without missing a beat,” closing the book, leaning back and, with his eyes focused “on some distant point,” continuing to recite, mesmerized him, Yarbrough said.
In a recent column, in which Yarbrough once again mentioned his former English professor as one of the three individuals who most profoundly influenced him, he said he was a freshman in college when he first encountered Dr. Cook.
In conversation, Cook recalled that Yarbrough was actually a sophomore at Georgia State University on that fateful day when he volunteered to analyze Kilmer’s poem. It’s hard to be certain after so many years.
One part of the story, however, has not changed with the passage of time: Dr. Cook still does not like the poem “Trees.” Kilmer’s famous poem ends with the line, “Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.”
“What Kilmer should have said is that poor poems are written by poor poets like me and good poems are written by good poets like Emily Dickinson, Donne, Byron Reece and a host of others,” he said.
Cook compares a poet to an engineer, with one significant difference.
“When a poet creates an image, he creates it in your eye and you expect him to be a good engineer there. The image Joyce Kilmer creates is all mixed up.”
Cook admits that during the years he taught English at Georgia State University, the University of Florida and Valdosta State College, he had a reputation for being strict, and demanding a lot from students, but that’s only because his students never took a class with some of the professors he studied under at Emory University and elsewhere, he said.
When he took a class in Anglo-Saxon literature under Dr. Garland Smith at Emory University, Cook said he had to prepare for at least three hours to go over 40 lines of the Anglo Saxon epic “Beowulf,” and Smith’s standards were exacting. A passing grade in that Ph.D. program was 90, he said. Anything less was a failing grade.
“Those were times of terrible beauty, I’ll tell you,” he said.
Cook was the first to earn a Ph.D. in English from Emory, he said.
At 90, Cook’s passion for the written word that Yarbrough said inspired him to finish school and work harder, burns as bright as ever. Since retiring from Valdosta State College in 1984, much of his poetic passion has been used to champion the work of Georgia mountain poet Byron Herbert Reece. The quality of Reece’s work puts him on a par with the greatest American poets, like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, he said.
“Reece was certainly a genius and the greatest thing to come out of Appalachia,” he said. “He is unique in his particular contribution and the greatest writer of the literary mountain ballad that the country has produced.”
Former Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill called Reece “one of the really great poets of our time, and to stand with those of any other time.”
Born on Sept. 17, 1917 in a one-room cabin in a meadow now covered by Vogel Lake, Reece had to divide his time between farming and his literary pursuits.
“The leeway between us and starvation was narrow,” he wrote.
After farming all day, Reece would read and write at night, tapping out his poems, letters and novels on a manual typewriter at a small desk under a single electric light. Cook said Reece once joked in a letter that the tires on his old Model A Ford were so thin that he didn’t let the full weight of his body down on the seat while driving.
Like other farmer-poets—Robert Burns, for example—Reece’s closeness to the land imparted an honesty and freshness to his writing. That honesty is one of the things Cook said he admires about Reece.
“No one understood the mountains like Reece did,” Cook said. “He had the most profound honesty regarding life and death of any writer I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve encountered hundreds of poets and writers in my lifetime.”
Reece contracted tuberculosis while caring for his parents who, along with his sister, had the disease. He also smoked heavily. Worn down by his hard-scrabble existence as a mountain farmer, his TB and the futility of trying to earn a living as a poet, he took his own life on June 3, 1958, at the age of forty. He was found in his office with Mozart playing on the record player and his final set of student papers graded and neatly stacked in the desk drawer, according to www.georgiaencyclopedia.org.
At the time of his death, Reece had published four volumes of poetry, two novels, won two Guggenheim awards, received the Georgia Writers Association's literary achievement award five times, and been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He also served as writer-in-residence at the University of California-Los Angeles, Emory University and Young Harris College.
Cook first met Reece when he was teaching at Georgia State University, where he also encountered Dick Yarbrough. He and his first wife had gone on an excursion to the North Georgia Mountains to view the fall foliage, he said. On the way back, they stopped in Helen, Ga., which he said was just a little mountain village then, to visit his old college classmate Phillip Greear and his wife Mildred.
“We planned to stay only a few minutes,” Cook said. “When we walked in we were introduced to a tall, lanky mountain farmer in overalls and muddy boots. He was a very quiet man and didn’t have a whole lot to say, but he could be primed to talk. And when he did start to talk, everything he said sounded important in a very modest kind of way. We had planned to stay there only about 30 minutes and we stayed there a couple of hours I think. When we got in the car, I told Mary Margaret, you know I have the most haunting feeling that we have spent the afternoon in the presence of a unique human being. That was my meeting with Byron Herbert Reece, and that feeling over the years grew into a conviction, which culminated in my biography over 25 years later.”
Cook corresponded with Reece, but his only other meeting with the poet was over pizza at Biuso’s, near the Peachtree Art Theater in Atlanta, when Reece was poet-in-residence at Emory. He said he found out later that Reece was very ill at the time. After they dropped him off, he said his sister commented how much Reece resembled musician Hoagy Carmichael.
“Reece had the same kind of craggy look,” he said.
Cook published “Mountain Singer: The life and legacy of Byron Herbert Reece,” in 1980, and followed it up with “Faithfully Yours: The letters of Byron Herbert Reece,” in 2007. He was instrumental, along with Dr. John Kay, in founding the Byron Herbert Reece Society. He succeeded in getting a grant approved from the Georgia Department of Transportation for $700,000 to renovate the Reece farmstead, and it is his wording that was used on the historic marker on Reece’s farm.
Other monuments to Reece’s legacy include the stretch of Highway 129 from Blairsville to Neel’s Gap, which has been named “The Byron Herbert Reece Highway.”
Cook left the presidency of Young Harris College in 1966 and moved to Valdosta where he served as Chairman of the English Department and Humanities Division at VSC. He later returned to full-time teaching in the English department, from which he retired in 1984.
Much more could be written about Dr. Cook. Spending a couple hours with him is like a history lesson. He owns a vintage Rolls-Royce Phantom III that was actually puchased by his first wife, Mary Margaret.
“Never once in the nearly 20 years before her death did she ride in the front seat, always utilizing me as chauffeur,” he said.
It was the last model Rolls-Royce designed by Royce himself, he said. It was originally purchased by Lt. Col. Jacob Schick who invented the Schick electric razor.
Cook has been a college president, a World War II Navy pilot, taught American literature in Iran on a fellowship, is a long-time HAM radio operator—-he used to talk with Senator Barry Goldwater on his HAM radio. But those are stories for another time. As Dick Yarbrough said, he is a wise man.
He married Elisabeth Mays Cook, originally from West Palm Beach, Fla. in 1995. She provides the perfect counterpoint to his poetic leitmotif, he said.
To learn more about Byron Herbert Reece, visit www.byronherbertreecesociety.org.
