In that book, The Road to the Temple, one may read how Cook, a member of an important family of Davenport, Iowa, became a young poet on the Mississippi and how he was educated at The University of Iowa, at Harvard, and at Heidelberg. ![]() But there has been no extended discussion of his career except for the biography that his wife, the playwright and novelist Susan Glaspell, prepared after his death and published in 1926-1927. The name of George Cram Cook (1873 1924) is mentioned briefly in most of the literary histories because he was the founder of the Provincetown Players and, therefore, the discoverer of Eugene O'Neill. Other commentators, too, recognized that his life was the living out of a myth, and the Dial reviewer saw both his poems and his life as "symbols wherein we may read one man's quest for the perfection of beauty." Although Cook has been praised for various things by some and completely ignored by others, it is only in relation to this quest that the activities of his life can be interpreted. It would be difficult to think of a more appropriate motto for George Cram Cook's career than "the poetry of living," for he engaged himself in a continual search for beauty, a search which made of his own life a work of art. ![]() ![]() In 1926 Babette Deutsch, reviewing George Cram Cook's posthumous volume of verse, Greek Coins, said, "The poetry of living, not the poetry of words, was his, and his poems are great where they catch the reflection of his life. George Cram Cook and the Poetry of Living,
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