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(This legendary book by an esteemed poet and beloved profe...)
This legendary book by an esteemed poet and beloved professor at Columbia University features a series of smart, witty, deeply perceptive essays about each of Shakespeare's plays, together with a further discussion of the poems. Writing with an incomparable knowledge of his subject but without a hint of pedantry, Van Doren elucidates both the astonishing boldness and myriad subtleties of Shakespeare's protean art. His Shakespeare is a book to be treasured by both new and longtime students of the Bard.
Mark Albert Van Doren was an American literary critic and poet.
Background
Van Doren was born on June 13, 1894, in Hope, United States. He was the son of Charles Lucius Van Doren, M. D. , and Dora Anne Butz.
A descendant of seventeenth-century Dutch immigrants to New Jersey, he was the fourth of five sons and the brother of Carl Van Doren, a historian, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
Education
A precocious youngster, Van Doren learned to read by the age of four and entered high school at age twelve. He was drawn early to the study of English, in large part, he said, because of his exposure to Latin and mathematics, which prepared him "to move among the mysteries of my own language. "
Latin especially taught him that grammar and syntax "are beautiful things so basic to the mind that if they are not known, nothing is known. " His love of poetry, he told poet Archibald MacLeish, came "suddenly" while reading Wordsworth as a college student and discovering that poetry was "music. "
Dryden, Shakespeare, Emerson, and Lincoln, he said, were the primary literary influences on his poetry and prose. He entered the University of Illinois at sixteen and earned both a B. A. (1914) and an M. A. in English (1915). He interrupted his doctoral studies at Columbia in 1917 to serve two years as a training officer and records supervisor in the United States Army without going overseas.
After World War I and before completing his dissertation, he and his close friend Joseph Wood Krutch were awarded Columbia fellowships that allowed them to travel together in Europe and England for a year. In 1920, Van Doren earned his Ph. D. and was appointed an English instructor at Columbia.
Career
Uncertain whether Van Doren would devote his career to teaching or writing, he regularly announced his imminent retirement from the classroom, but he abandoned that practice by the end of the decade after deciding that he could do both. He quickly became one of the luminaries on the Columbia faculty, advancing to full professor in 1942 and teaching highly popular courses in both the college and the graduate school until his retirement in 1959.
His classes on Shakespeare, in which undergraduates read all thirty-four plays over two semesters, were regularly oversubscribed. During the 1930's, he gave lectures at the New School in New York and from 1937 to 1957 was a visiting lecturer at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. He was a visiting professor at Harvard in 1963.
In 1920, he began a long association with The Nation as a book reviewer, serving as literary editor from 1924 to 1928 and movie critic from 1935 to 1938. From 1940 to 1942 he was a panelist on the CBS radio program "Invitation to Learning. "
In 1943, at the request of the American Association of Colleges, he wrote Liberal Education, which celebrated the primary place of the humanities in educating men and women and looked at the post-World War II development of the nation's schools and colleges. All of this served to broaden his reputation as a critic and teacher, but it was only a modest part of his prolific literary and scholarly output during his academic career.
Van Doren's scholarly contribution outside the classroom came in his two dozen books of literary commentary and criticism. Beginning with Henry David Thoreau (1916), a reworking of his master's thesis, and The Poetry of John Dryden (1920), his Ph. D. dissertation, and extending through such books as The Private Reader (1942), The Noble Voice: A Study of Ten Great Poems (1946), and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1949), Van Doren took it as his job "to distinguish between the important and the unimportant; and after that, to seek the essential. "
His Shakespeare (1939) was for many years a standard introductory text to the plays, and Introduction to Poetry (1951) was widely used at both the college and the secondary level. It was, a New York Times reviewer noted, "a small model of discrimination. " Some academic critics dismissed his writings as "not criticism, but merely commentary, " but others were generally approving and his books often found a wide audience. His fiction was not successful. There were two psychological novels, The Transients (1935) and Windless Cabins (1940), that reviewers found "unconvincing" or "vague, " and Tilda (1943), a slender novel of wartime romance.
His short fiction, notably The Witch of Ramoth (1950) and The Short Stories (1950), also fared poorly. His Collected Stories appeared in three volumes (1962 - 1968). He wrote several children's books, the most successful of which was The Transparent Tree (1940), which reviewers found "haunting" and "enchanting. " It featured drawings by Carl's daughter, Margaret, who went on to a distinguished career as an illustrator and author of children's books.
As editor or coeditor, he published some two dozen titles including Samuel Sewall's Diary (1927), an edition of Parson Weems's life of George Washington (1927), The Night of the Summer Solstice and Other Stories of the Russian War (1943), The Portable Emerson (1946), and several anthologies of poetry and prose. In 1925, he and his brother Carl collaborated on American and British Literature Since 1890. His last book was In the Beginning, Love: Dialogues on the Bible, written with Maurice Samuel and published posthumously in 1973.
Charles achieved a national celebrity in 1957, by winning $120, 000 on "Twenty-one, " a nationally televised quiz show, but two years later was disgraced when he revealed to a congressional committee that the program had been rigged and that he had been given the answers to all the questions in advance.
The ensuing scandal, involving numerous television executives and other prizewinners, was a sad and painful time for the Van Dorens, especially after Charles resigned his teaching position at Columbia, where he had shared an office with his father. The tawdry affair led to the exclusion of quiz shows from the network and local broadcasting for more than a decade.
Mark Van Doren died following complications from circulatory surgery in Torrington, Connecticut, and is buried in Cornwall, Connecticut.
Van Doren meant to approach his readers as he approached his students in the classroom: as experienced co-discoverers in the search for a larger understanding of what was read. He would be the guide, seeking in the play or poem or story, the writer's "report on the world as it is, without exaggeration or make-believe. "
His books rarely turned on literary theory and are largely devoid of scholarly apparatus. They are instead the extended conversations of one who saw himself as "a reader, a teacher, a critic, and a poet. "
Quotations:
"It’s a curious thing. I suppose most people think of artists as impatient but I don’t know of any first-rate artist who hasn’t manifested in his career an appalling patience, a willingness to wait and to do his best now in the expectation that next year he will do better. "
"Any piece of knowledge I acquire today has a value at this moment exactly proportional to my skill to deal with it. Tomorrow, when I know more, I recall that piece of knowledge and use it better. "
"The art of reading is the art of adopting the pace the author has set. Some books are fast and some are slow, but no book can be understood if it is taken at the wrong speed. "
"Nothing in man is more serious than his sense of humor; it is the sign that he wants all the truth. "
"The connectedness of things is what the educator contemplates to the limit of his capacity. No human capacity is great enough to permit a vision of the world as simple, but if the educator does not aim at the vision no one else will, and the consequences are dire when no one does. "
"There are two statements about human beings that are true: that all human beings are alike, and that all are different. On those two facts all human wisdom is founded. "
"Bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king. "
"There is one thing we can do, and the happiest of people are those who do it to the limit of their ability. We can be completely present. "
"Wisdom before experience is only words; wisdom after experience is of no avail. "
"An unexamined idea, to paraphrase Socrates, is not worth having and a society whose ideas are never explored for possible error may eventually find its foundations insecure. "
"I have always had the greatest respect for students. There is nothing I hate more than condescension—the attitude that they are inferior to you. I always assume they have good minds. "
Personality
Van Doren grew up in comfortable middle-class circumstances in the Illinois prairie towns of Hope and Urbana. He was, he wrote, "an affectionate child in an affectionate family, " living in a house of books, in a world of farm animals and walnut groves, of small-town traditions and firm friendships, amid strong men and strong women the elements he came to celebrate in his poetry, which is dominated by nostalgic, pastoral imagery.
He frequently remarked that the major tension in his life (both artistic and personal) arose from his inability to choose between life in the city and life in the country. He had the best of both worlds, he noted, after his literary success in New York made it possible for him to spend part of each year in a townhouse on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village and the remainder on a 150-acre farm in rural Cornwall, Connecticut.
A shy, gentleman, he was, by all accounts, an extraordinary figure in the classroom. Students as various as Lionel Trilling, Thomas Merton, Clifton Fadiman, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Louis Simpson, and John Berryman many of whom remained his lifelong friends attested to his powers, especially his capacity to listen, the mesmerizing attention he paid to the texts under study, and his ability to draw from his students thoughts that heretofore had been inchoate. Most of them remembered his delight in doing what he was doing.
What really goes on in a classroom once the door is closed, Van Doren wrote, is "a kind of secret" shared by the participants, but his role as a teacher was always clear. It was to hear his students out, to aid them singly and collectively in discovering what they knew, to be "personal and patient and alive. " His model, he said, was a master teacher he had encountered in high school in Urbana.
He was Miletus Flaningam, the high school principal, who as a substitute for the regular English teacher made Van Doren for the first time understand and feel the power of Macbeth and understand, as well, the power of first-rate teaching. "In forty minutes he created a world perhaps the world and I was never to forget it, " Van Doren later wrote of the experience.
His early poems are perhaps his best. But even in his later work, Van Doren is recognized as a careful craftsman, and his poems as clear, lyrical and well shaped. As a poet, he was often compared to Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost, though clearly, his poems lack the dark undertones that are so much a part of the other men's work.
Posthumous assessments of Van Doren's poetry tend to be dismissive because so many of his poems lie outside the experimentalism and the themes of contemporary writing, and because they center on a pastoral America that has long since been lost.
Quotes from others about the person
"As the early winter twilight crept over the Columbia campus, " Alfred Kazin wrote of one class, "Van Doren's craggy face looked as if he expected the sun to come out because he was teaching Virgil. "
Connections
Van Doren married Dorothy Graffe on September 1, 1922. She was an associate editor with The Nation for seventeen years and later a novelist and essayist. They had two sons, John and Charles.