Word: doren
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...Doren's other life, his life away from teaching and criticism, is that of a poet. "The art of poetry I conceived to be the art of telling stories or otherwise rendering account of the single world all men inhabit" he writes in The Autobiography of Mark Van Doren. Thus his verse becomes a record of his life, both physical and mental. He wrote often of the war, of his family, of children, of love. Perhaps his richest subject matter is the country. He was born on a farm in Hope, Illinois and has spent much of his later life...
...have no sympathy for people who say they have no time to writer. We don't have to do anything." He related how Shakespeare had left his wife and children to go to London to write. "It is absurd to say he shouldn't have done that" Van Doren said...
...tells the story of Herman Wouk (for whom he makes no claims as a novelist) who decided to be a writer, and spent three years just reading the great stories of the world. This is close to what Van Doren believes one should do and modern novelists...
...Doren has one consistent point to make about style it is that the writer must be completely drenched with his subject before writing. Otherwise his creation lacks unity and wholeness. He relates the story of how he wrote his play, The Last Days of Lincoln. For three years he prowled around New York bookstores, buying and reading everything he could find about Lincoln. One day he was on a lecture tour in North Caroline. Although he had left all his notes home Van Doren says "I heard Lincoln talking to me." He took out the hardbound black notebook he always...
...during high school. "This piece sounds like you have been writing from notes. Chew everything up and spit it out in one stream" he said. If the metaphor is a bit inelegant the advice is sound, and it is not an accident that the editor was one of Van Doren's most devoted and fondly remembered students at Columbia...