Mark Van Doren (June 13, 1894 – December 10, 1972) was an American poet, writer and a critic, apart from being a scholar and a professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, where he inspired a generation of influential writers and thinkers including Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, John Berryman, and Beat Generation writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He remained literary editor of The Nation, in New York City (1924–28), and its film critic, 1935 to 1938.
Amongst his notable works, many published in The Kenyon Review, include a collaboration with brother Carl Van Doren, American and British Literature since 1890 (1939), the play The Last Days of Lincoln; critical studies, The Poetry of John Dryden (1920), Shakespeare (1939), The Noble Voice (1945) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1949), collections of poems like three book-length narrative poems: Jonathan Gentry (1931), stories, and the verse play The Last Days of Lincoln (1959).
Read more about Mark Van Doren: Early Life, Career, Personal Life, Legacy, Bibliography, Reviews, Quotes, Further Reading
Famous quotes containing the words mark van, mark, van and/or doren:
“Your mouth, dear child, is envied of the bees.”
—Unknown. The Thousand and One Nights.
AWP. Anthology of World Poetry, An. Mark Van Doren, ed. (Rev. and enl. Ed., 1936)
“So unrecorded did it slip away,
So blind was I to see and to foresee,
So dull to mark the budding of my tree
That would not blossom yet for many a May.
If only I could recollect it, such
A day of days! I let it come and go
As traceless as a thaw of bygone snow;
It seemed to mean so little, meant so much;
If only now I could recall that touch,
First touch of hand in hand—Did one but know!”
—Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894)
“The legend of Felix is ended, the toiling of Felix is done;
The Master has paid him his wages, the goal of his journey is won;
He rests, but he never is idle; a thousand years pass like a day,
In the glad surprise of Paradise where work is sweeter than play.”
—Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933)
“Ferdinand De Soto, sleeping
In the river, never heard
Four-and-twenty Spanish hooves
Fling off their iron and cut the green,
Leaving circles new and clean
While overhead the wing-tips whirred.”
—Mark Van Doren (1894–1973)