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

Famous quotes containing the words mark van doren, van doren, mark, van and/or doren:

    Love was before the light began,
    When light if over,love shall be
    —Unknown. The Thousand and One Nights.

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

    A classic is a book that doesn’t have to be written again.
    —Carl Van Doren (1885–1950)

    Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick;...
    Bible: New Testament, Mark 2:17.

    Oh, London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air;
    And Paris is a woman’s town, with flowers in her hair;
    And it’s sweet to dream in Venice, and it’s great to study Rome;
    But when it comes to living, there is no place like home.
    —Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933)

    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)