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separable, that their relations are organic, intricate, numerous, and
subtle. They share profoundly, in their traditional forms, an insis–
tence on and embodiment of "seeing life steadily ... and whole."
Whereas so much modern life, work, and intellection have grown
more mechanical, disaffected, and specialized, classic and enduring
literature and traditional religion must concern themselves with the
whole, with integrity, proportion, emotion, morale, and synthesis.
Some of these points about Van Doren were made a decade
before Howard's essay by Allen Tate, writing about his poetry. He
saw Van Doren as a "formalist" who was "day by day the whole man
who submits the whole range of his awareness to the forms that he
has elected to use" and "a great poet in the minor modes."
But if his poetic modes were mostly minor because short - his
narrative poetry, like most narrative poetry, not winning much ac–
ceptance in our time- his poetic vocation was lifelong and inextric–
ably bound up with his other callings: teacher, critic, friend, and
sage.
In
fact these aspects are hard to separate, as George Hendrick's
finely chosen and edited volume of Van Doren's letters shows.
Not only poets and other writers but also colleagues and stu–
dents have commented on Van Doren's "undismembered self." Don–
ald Keene, who was later to become an eminent scholar and trans–
lator from the Japanese, spoke of Van Doren's "generosity and deep
humanity," and remembered his remarks "that no action was more
specifically human than to praise." Edith Samuel, with whose hus–
band, Maurice Samuel, Van Doren had a series of radio dialogues
on the Bible, has written that whenever she and her husband used to
speak of him, "and it was often," they "invariably came back to the
Biblical Hebrew word,
hesed.
He was for us the personification of the
idea of loving-kindness." Bernard Mandelbaum recently wrote that
he entered Columbia College "a pre-medical student.
In
six months
of Humanities with Van Doren I changed to a major in philosophy"
and "was eventually ordained as a Rabbi." Mandelbaum also noted
that Thomas Merton "was exposed to Mark Van Doren, and ended
up a Trappist monk," as well as one of the major religious writers of
our time. This influence Merton himself described in detail in
The
Seven Storey Mountain.
Van Doren's relations with those of his students who became
poets have an inevitable prominence, and they are amply attested to
by his letters.
It
would be difficult to conceive a more distinguished
group of modern American poets than those who were taught or
