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 van doren, mark, van and/or doren:
“For him nor deep nor hill there is,
But all’s one level plain he hunts for flowers.”
—Unknown. The Thousand and One Nights.
AWP. Anthology of World Poetry, An. Mark Van Doren, ed. (Rev. and enl. Ed., 1936)
“His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,”
—Robert Francis (b. 1901)
“Narcotics have been systematically scapegoated and demonized. The idea that anyone can use drugs and escape a horrible fate is an anathema to these idiots. I predict that in the near future, right wingers will use drug hysteria as a pretext to set up an international police apparatus.”
—Gus Van Sant, U.S. screenwriter and director, and Dan Yost. Father Tom Murphy (William S. Burroughs)
“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)