Vol. 56 No. 2 1989 - page 318

306
PARTISAN REVIEW
routine is typical of modern literature since, say, Tolstoi . ..
[and suggests] a limitation of our conception of the spiritual life .
. . . The possibility of tragic art depends primarily upon the
worth we ascribe not to dying but to living, and to living in 'the
common routine.'
In poetry, prose, and life Van Doren often celebrated,
inter alia,
"the common routine," the quotidian, the simple, the normal, the
apparently unpoetical and unliterary, but never in a complacent or
middlebrow way. His body of poetry, criticism, and fiction, and his
long and enduringly influential teaching career at Columbia Univer–
sity all provide a profound contrast and challenge to many of the
chief features and tenets of literary and cultural modernism. This is
well illustrated in an essay on Van Doren's poetry by one of his
former students, the poet Richard Howard. The essay, "To Be,
While Still Becoming: A Note on the Lyric Verse
(1924-1972)
of
Mark Van Doren," introduces the last volume of Van Doren's
poems,
Good Morning
(1973),
and is a necessary starting point for
serious consideration of his poetry, but it also sheds a great deal of
light on the "modern temper" in general, of which Van Doren was
acutely aware.
According to Howard, Van Doren's kind of poetry, both "ante–
dates" and "underlies" our "modern orthodoxy of
terribilita
and its
searing wisdom ... of transgressed limits, for it is the song of" [as
Van Doren wrote]:
. . . the middle world
That was made as if by children,
Nor is changed with growing old .
Howard notes "our difficulties" with Van Doren's philosophical and
poetic "ease ... imperturbable grace, the clarity and radiance of an
undismembered self," "lack of tragic contention" and "denial of ex–
tremity," his preference for "centers to edges, meetings to sunder–
ings," his love and practice of the poetry and prose of
statement.
In his love and practice ofjudicious and eloquent statements of
the normal, of the habitually excluded middle, Van Doren displayed
a critical intelligibility and modesty and a traditional piety very rare
in our time. He knew that although religion, philosophy, and litera–
ture are not identical or interchangeable, they are not easily or safely
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