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Mark Van Doren

Mark Van Doren (1894 –1972) was an influential literary critic, poet, and scholar who taught at Columbia University for almost four decades. He was literary editor of The Nation, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Collected Poems 1922–1938.

Author

She Lives With Me

Winter 1952 | Poetry

She lives with me and is my careless love;All of my faults are funny in her heart.All of her faults—but she has buried those;I cannot find them with my fondest art. I watch and pry, and have a name for oneShould it be ever proven and confessed:T [...]

Literature and Propaganda

It can be said that every piece of literature is propaganda of a kind. The lyric poet, merely for assuming the importance of his theme, can be charged with suggesting that other themes are of less importance or of no importance at all; the sonneteer [...]

The Funeral

Autumn 1936 | Poetry

Four hundred dollars beat for him Like a still heart within the house,
Midway the wall whereon a clock Made nightly music for the mouse.

Big and Little Poetry

The Testament of Beauty. A Poem in Pour Books. By Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate. New York: Oxford University Press. $3.50. The Compleal Workes of Cini IVitloughby Bering. New York: Payson and Clarke (Brewer and Warren). $5.00. It is of course an [...]

Proper Clay

Their little room grew light with cries; He woke and heard them thread the dark, He woke and felt them like the rays Of some unlawful dawn at work— Some random sunrise, lost and small, That found the room's heart, vein by vein. But she was [...]