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 van doren, mark, van and/or doren:

    I please
    To plant some more dew-wet anemones
    That they may weep.
    —Unknown. The Thousand and One Nights.

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

    The gap between ideals and actualities, between dreams and achievements, the gap that can spur strong men to increased exertions, but can break the spirit of others—this gap is the most conspicuous, continuous land mark in American history. It is conspicuous and continuous not because Americans achieve little, but because they dream grandly. The gap is a standing reproach to Americans; but it marks them off as a special and singularly admirable community among the world’s peoples.
    George F. Will (b. 1941)

    On the farm I had learned how to meet realities without suffering either mentally or physically. My initiative had never been blunted. I had freedom to succeed—freedom to fail. Life on the farm produces a kind of toughness.
    —Bertha Van Hoosen (1863–1952)

    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)