Word: doren
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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COLLECTED POEMS-Mark Van Doren -Holt...
...light verse. His cats are delightful, and the book is in every way pleasing. His "Family Reunion," published last Spring created the nearest thing to a literary cause celebre that Harvard had seen in years. You can give it to reactionary Anglophile classicists, if you know any. . . . Mark Van Doren's "Collected Poems, 1922-1938" give a good picture of a sensitive and rather mystical mind. Mr. Van Doren's "Shakespeare" cannot be too highly recommended. An entirely fresh and illuminating critical appraisal. . . . Stephen Spender and J. L. Gilli have translated some poems of the young Spanish poet. F. Gareia...
Biography: Carl Van Doren's "Benjamin Franklin" is a scholarly yet decidedly reasonable account of our "first civilized American." as Charles Edward Russell once called him. . . . Of course, Carl Sandburg's "Abraham Lincoln: The War Years" is the biography of this or, apparently, any other year. A new edition of "The Pratrio Years" is now also available. . . . Henry Seidel Canby's "Thoreau" is a good, solid work on a great American writer. . . . Havelock Ellis' "My Life" is an undistinguished chronicle of a distinguish life. . . Henry F. Pringle makes "The Life and Times of William Howard Taft" a far more appealing...
This is a book without "theories" about the plays, and I enclose the word in inverted commas because the book is in fact crowded with theories which are carefully to be distinguished from the stuff of doctoral theses. Mr. Van Doren's comment on Falstaff's style is a case in point: "(Falstaff) being old and fat, he is short of breath and so must be brief of phrase . . . He has made the most of this limitation. Artist that he is, he has accepted its challenge and employed it in effects that express his genius with a notable and economical...
...Doren turns from time to time to Dr. Johnson, but not, in the scholarly fashion, to buttress a point: it is rather as if he had found in that practical, intelligent and independent critic a turn of mind often not dissimilar to his own. Independence is indeed the keynote of Mr. Van Doren's book. In putting behind him the apparatus and techniques of scholarship, he has dared to do what few other critics have done: he has come face to face with Shakespeare. He has recreated the Shakespearean world, and one would like to quote the entire book...