Mark Van Doren

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

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    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)

    I passed a tomb among green shades
    Where seven anemones with down-dropped heads
    Wept tears of dew upon the stone beneath.
    —Unknown. The Thousand and One Nights.

    AWP. Anthology of World Poetry, An. Mark Van Doren, ed. (Rev. and enl. Ed., 1936)

    But I am here,
    And they are far, and time is old.
    Within my dream the grass is cold;
    The legs and locked; the sky is dead.
    Mark Van Doren (1894–1973)

    ...they look like trees, walking.
    Bible: New Testament, Mark 8:24.

    A man partially healed of blindness commenting on what he sees.

    Babe, you know how these things go, it’s like a crap game. When you’re hot you shoot everything, you shoot the works. Well, right now baby, I’m so hot I’m burning up all over.
    —Gus Van Sant, U.S. screenwriter, and Dan Yost. Bob Hughes (Matt Dillon)

    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)