He spent most of his career at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he was the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, and where he founded one of the preeminent medieval studies graduate programs in North America.

His published output included lengthy interpretations of Beowulf, and of poems and passages by Dante and Chaucer, and frequently constituted leading studies.

Kaske particularly enjoyed solving cruxes, with articles on problematic passages in works such as Pearl, Piers Plowman, the Divine Comedy, "The Husband's Message", "The Descent into Hell", and Beowulf.

He was a four-year member of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, and was commissioned a second lieutenant before his 1942 graduation; much of the next four years was spent with the Army in the South Pacific during World War II.

A popular and "Falstaffian" professor,[5] Kaske, along with the medieval studies program he founded, was credited by colleagues with producing the backbone of the discipline's next scholastic generation.

[48] He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army's field artillery on May 25, 1942,[49] and ordered to report to Fort Thomas for a physical examination and assignment,[48] with a furlough to account for his June commencement.

[50] Speaking to Kaske and 24 others, the commencement speaker, Archbishop John T. McNicholas, stated "[m]ay I assure the Second Lieutenants of this graduating class that the Archdiocese of Cincinnati is proud of them.

[53] During a leave at the end of 1943, while stationed at Fort Hood, he served as a best man at a wedding in Cleburne, Texas,[54] took out his own marriage license a week later,[55] and married in January.

[61] As at Xavier, Kaske wrote for a student paper, Factotum,[63][64][65] including poems,[66][67] and at least one short story: "Sergeant Hinchey's Homecoming", about a veteran regaling an unsuspecting church group with ribald tales from service in Hawaii, Angaur, Texas, and Kwajalein.

[87][88] A year later, Kaske was awarded a grant by the American Council of Learned Societies to work on a book, provisionally titled The Heroic Ideal in Old English Poetry.

[92] After three years Kaske left for the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he was hired as a tenured full professor on September 1, 1961, with a starting annual salary of $13,000 (equivalent to $133,000 in 2023); he would henceforth term this move the time he "published himself out of paradise".

[4][93][note 6] In the fall semester of 1963, Kaske, who later admitted he was "looking around" and anxious to leave Illinois, took a six-month visiting professorship at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

[4] In 1968, a year in which he was first listed in Who's Who in America,[60][100] Kaske was awarded another grant by the American Council of Learned Societies, this time to travel to England and search for the sources of imagery in poems by the unknown Gawain Poet.

[101][102] Another grant by the organization followed in 1971, for further research into the heroic ideal in Old English poetry,[103] and that year Kaske participated in a symposium on Geoffrey Chaucer held at the University of Georgia.

[108] In 1975, he was appointed chief editor of the journal Traditio,[6] and in 1977, he again won a Guggenheim Fellowship, this time to undertake research on the sources and methodology for the interpretation of medieval imagery.

[109] In 1984–85, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Kaske a Fellowship for Independent Study and Research; he intended to use it to complete a manual for scholars of medieval literature.

[124] Kaske nonetheless firmly believed that such contextual learning remained one of the most promising ways to make new discoveries about the meaning conveyed by literary works.

"[125] He was a "master" at combining "insight and scholarly rigor", wrote Brown, joining "imagination in literary interpretation with the painstaking historical research required to gather supporting evidence".

[7][84][137][138] A funeral was held on August 26, at Ithaca's Immaculate Conception Church,[139] and a memorial service on 21 October at Sage Chapel, with contributions suggested to the university library's Dante-Petrarch or Icelandic collections.

[145] These included articles on problematic passages in works such as Pearl,[146] Piers Plowman,[80][81][147][148] Dante's Divine Comedy,[149] Chaucer's "The Summoner's Tale",[150] "The Husband's Message",[151] "The Descent into Hell",[152] Troilus and Criseyde,[153] Le Jeu d'Adam,[154] and Beowulf,[155][156] and on the correct reading of engravings on spoons found in the seventh-century Sutton Hoo ship-burial.

"[158] In 1988 Kaske published Medieval Christian Literary Imagery: A Guide to Interpretation,[159] which colleagues referred to as a "magisterial work" that served as "the crowning achievement of his scholarly career".