Kenneth Cox (1916–2005) was a British literary critic and essayist. He briefly attended University of London before working as a cryptographer in Cairo and Palestine during World War II, for which he was awarded an MBE (Most Excellent Order of the British Empire). After the war, he worked at the BBC in the Near Eastern Department, where he remained for the rest of his working life.

Cox spoke and read fluently over a dozen languages. He translated Frederigo Tozzi and Giacomo Leopardi from Italian, poetry by Sorley Maclean from Scottish Gaelic, and wrote in French and English about François de Malherbe and Jules Laforgue. His first essays were not published until 1966, beginning with "The Aesthetic of Basil Bunting" in William Cookson's Agenda. Over the next 35 years, his essays and reviews appeared regularly in Agenda and the Australian magazine Scripsi, as well as in Cambridge Quarterly, PN Review, and Montemora. In particular, Cox admired and wrote extensively about Ezra Pound and Lorine Niedecker, with whom he had a warm friendship. Although he published individual essays and reviews, his only full-length book, Collected Studies in the Use of English (Agenda Editions), was not published until he was 85, in 2001.