Collected Poems
by Mark Van Doren
Summary
This volume gathers Mark Van Doren's poetry from 1922 to 1938, the first sixteen years of a writing life he carried on alongside four decades of teaching English at Columbia University. Van Doren had already published critical studies of John Dryden and Edwin Arlington Robinson by the time this collection appeared, and the same qualities that made him a celebrated teacher, clarity, patience, a refusal to make literature seem harder than it is, run through the poems themselves. He worked mostly in traditional forms, favoring plain statement over ornament and trusting a reader to follow a direct sentence rather than needing to be led through a difficult one.
Van Doren's students during these same years included Thomas Merton, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and more than one of them later credited him with teaching them to read poetry as something spoken rather than merely printed, a lesson that shows in his own verse's conversational directness. The collection draws together sixteen years of a poet working steadily rather than chasing a single defining book, and its unifying thread is less a subject than a temperament: unhurried, exact, more interested in getting a line right than in sounding important.
Reading Collected Poems means encountering a poet best known in his own lifetime as a teacher first, and it suits a reader who wants American verse from between the wars written in a clear, companionable voice rather than in the harder modernist idiom of some of Van Doren's contemporaries. It rewards patience over any search for a single showpiece poem, since its value lies in the accumulated body of work rather than in one dramatic high point.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Mark Van Doren the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for this Collected Poems, recognizing sixteen years of published work rather than a single new book. Van Doren was, by 1940, already a well established figure at Columbia University, where he had taught since 1920 and would remain, eventually as a full professor, into the 1950s.
His influence reached well past his own poetry. Columbia later established the Mark Van Doren Award for teaching in his honor, and students who passed through his classroom, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Thomas Merton, went on to shape American letters in the decades after this prize, several of them citing him directly as the teacher who changed how they read. Van Doren kept publishing poetry and criticism for another three decades after this award, teaching at Columbia until his retirement in 1959 and dying in 1972.