Brian Cox (poet)

1928–2008

See index for CA sketch: Born September 5, 1928, in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, England; died April 24, 2008. Educator, poet, editor, and author. Cox was a professor of English at the University of Manchester for nearly thirty years, retiring in 1993 as the John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature. For an even longer period, beginning in 1959, he was a founding coeditor of the Critical Quarterly, which became highly respected as a publisher of emerging poets such as Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Philip Larkin. His lifelong commitment, however, was to education—from the primary level through university. Despite Cox's scholarly and literary achievements, it was his activism on behalf of education that thrust him into public view as the creator of the "black papers." There were five black papers in all—collections of articles by various contributors who were critical, as Cox was, of the demise and current state of education in British schools. Cox lamented the loss of the quality in education that he had received as a youth and wished to restore it for his own children and other generations to follow. The papers generated much controversy, political debate, and media attention. For Cox, their publication led to additional responsibilities as a member of the Kingman committee to create an English language curriculum in 1987, among other appointments. Cox had also begun editing book-length collections of work by other poets and publishing his own poetry, including Every Commo

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