When The Paris Review finally got around to interviewing Malcolm Cowley in 1982, when he was 84, among the first questions the magazine posed was this: “Do you regret not having concentrated more fully on your poetry?” Cowley said yes. His problem, he added, “was the essentially middle-class feeling that I had to support myself.”

Cowley (1898-1989) wasn’t a bad poet. His best verse is collected in a volume called “Blue Juniata” (1985). But we can be grateful that relative poverty mostly forced him to put poetry aside. He was more adept in almost every other arena: as a critic, historian, editor, journalist and translator, a “one-man assembly line,” in the words of a colleague. Cowley was also perhaps the greatest literary cross-pollinator of the 20th century. It’s impossible to imagine the American canon without him.

It’s tempting to fill the rest of this space, as if it were a puff pastry, with a creamy list of Cowley’s attainments. (Buzzfeed’s version would be “17 Surprising Things You Didn’t Know About Malcolm Cowley.”) I’ll try to winnow it.

A) William Faulkner’s novels were almost entirely out of print when Cowley went on a rescue mission, editing “The Portable Faulkner” (1946). Faulkner won the Nobel Prize four years later. “Damn you to hell anyway,” Faulkner wrote to him. “I didn’t know myself what I had tried to do, and how much I had succeeded.”