Mark Van Doren
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"Mark Van Doren" was an American poet, writer and a critic, apart from being a scholar and a professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, where he inspired a generation of influential writers and thinkers including Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, John Berryman, Whittaker Chambers, and Beat Generation writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He was literary editor of The Nation (U.S. periodical)/The Nation, in New York City (1924–28), and its film critic, 1935 to 1938.

He won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize/1940 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Collected Poems 1922–1938. Amongst his other notable works, many published in The Kenyon Review, include a collaboration with brother Carl Van Doren, American and British Literature since 1890 (1939); critical studies, The Poetry of John Dryden (1920), Shakespeare (1939), The Noble Voice (1945) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1949); collections of poems including Jonathan Gentry (1931); stories; and the verse play The Last Days of Lincoln (1959).

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The job of the poet is to render the world - to see it and report it without loss, without perversion. No poet ever talks about feelings. Only sentimental people do.

Memory holds together past and present, gives continuity and dignity to human life... the companion... the tutor, the poet, the library, with which you travel.

To be what no one ever was, To be what everyone has been: Freedom is the mean of those Extremes that fence all effort in.

Nothing in man is more serious than his sense of humor; it is the sign that he wants all the truth.

When it aims to express a love of the world it refuses to conceal the many reasons why the world is hard to love, though we must love it because we have no other, and to fail to love it is not to exist at all.

Though we all know that the survival of the species depends on producing children, up until now we haven't understood how germ cells in the developing embryos decide whether to eventually become the sperm or eggs needed later for adult reproduction. Now we know one way these other cells are talking to germ cells about sex.

To fail to love is not to exist at all.

Bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king.