Word: doren
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...TRANSIENTS-Mark Van Doren- Morrow...
...Mark Van Doren, of the literary Van Dorens (Sister-in-law Irita is editor of the Herald Tribune Books; Brother Carl is chief editor of the Literary Guild), is a poet. Though he is 40, The Transients is his first novel. In self-consciously dignified prose he tells a poetic parable...
Author Van Doren's sentences sometimes have immortal longings, oftener trip up on unfamiliar hard ground. But occasionally his earthly visitants speak in character, as in these comments on their human hosts: "Unable to know good without bad, they congratulate themselves upon being the only creatures for whom both exist. Unable to live long, they claim a special beauty for their limited lives. Unable to conceive eternity, they worship time. Unable to avoid suffering and disappointment, they pretend that these are nobler teachers than felicity and truth. Unable to achieve anything better than the sorriest confusion in their minds...
...Author, Tightlipped, long-faced Mark Van Doren, like his three-year junior, Thornton Wilder (see col. 1), learned his songster's art in the gilded academic cage. But his trial flights have been less bold and less successful than Wilder's. Graduate of his native University of Illinois, a Columbia Ph. D., an assistant professor of English at Columbia, he has confined his extracurricular activities to the literary editorship of the Nation (1924-28). critical studies, books of poems...
Fellow-Poet Mark Van Doren hails Jesse Stuart as an "American Burns." Man with a Bull-Tongue Robert Plow, a collection of 703 sonnetesque verses, sings only homespun heroes, vaunts the excellences of Kentucky farmlife, mourns the mortality of Poet Stuart's love affairs and friends. No book to read through at a sitting, it will prove to the plainest reader that, in Poet Van Doren's words, Stuart is "a rare poet for these times . . . both copious and comprehensible." Some samples of his comprehensible copiosities: Where are the friends of youth I miss ? Elmer and Bert, Oscar...