| Who was Mark Van Doren? Does the name sound familiar to you? From Wikipedia: “Mark Van Doren (June 13, 1894 – December 10, 1972) was an American poet, writer and critic. He was a scholar and a professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, where he inspired a generation of influential writers and thinkers….” The Wikipedia article is HERE. |  |
The Poetry Foundation mentions that “At Columbia, he influenced a number of student writers, including John Berryman, Richard Howard, Allen Ginsberg, John Hollander, and Louis Simpson,” but their article does not mention Jack Kerouac – supposedly, Kerouac earned “an A in Van Doren's Shakespeare course, and decided in consequence to quit the Columbia football team and take up literature instead." The Poetry Foundation article is HERE.
So why all this info on Mark Van Doren?
Van Doren wrote the Foreword in Millicent Todd Bingham’s 1945 book “Bolts of Melody, New Poems of Emily Dickinson” – a volume which, 60 years after the poet’s death, included 600-plus poems which had never been published before.
Van Doren began his Foreword, “No reader of student of Emily Dickinson needs to be told that the appearance of this book is an event of large importance.” Later in the opening paragraph he states that the release of this book “is news on so impressive a scale that one may well hesitate to improvise a statement of its value.”
In his preface to Bingham’s introduction to the book, he also discusses the “task” of editing Dickinson, describing it as both “a tease and a torment”:
“The materials, the manuscripts, are either chaotic or elusive; sometimes they require so many decisions by the editor as to constitute him, provided his choices are wise, a poet himself; sometimes they seem to be clearer than they are, so that days of reflection will be necessary before a comma stays in or goes out.”
I’ll be discussing this in further detail in the coming days – especially with the poem “Two butterflies went out at noon.”
Back to Mark Van Doren. He has one other odd connection to popular culture: his son Charles was an American writer and editor who was involved in a television quiz show scandal in the 1950s. In 1959 he testified before the United States Congress that he had been given the correct answers by the producers of the NBC quiz show “Twenty-One.” He was played by Ralph Fiennes in the 1994 movie “Quiz Show.”
So why all this info on Mark Van Doren?
Van Doren wrote the Foreword in Millicent Todd Bingham’s 1945 book “Bolts of Melody, New Poems of Emily Dickinson” – a volume which, 60 years after the poet’s death, included 600-plus poems which had never been published before.
Van Doren began his Foreword, “No reader of student of Emily Dickinson needs to be told that the appearance of this book is an event of large importance.” Later in the opening paragraph he states that the release of this book “is news on so impressive a scale that one may well hesitate to improvise a statement of its value.”
In his preface to Bingham’s introduction to the book, he also discusses the “task” of editing Dickinson, describing it as both “a tease and a torment”:
“The materials, the manuscripts, are either chaotic or elusive; sometimes they require so many decisions by the editor as to constitute him, provided his choices are wise, a poet himself; sometimes they seem to be clearer than they are, so that days of reflection will be necessary before a comma stays in or goes out.”
I’ll be discussing this in further detail in the coming days – especially with the poem “Two butterflies went out at noon.”
Back to Mark Van Doren. He has one other odd connection to popular culture: his son Charles was an American writer and editor who was involved in a television quiz show scandal in the 1950s. In 1959 he testified before the United States Congress that he had been given the correct answers by the producers of the NBC quiz show “Twenty-One.” He was played by Ralph Fiennes in the 1994 movie “Quiz Show.”
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