Mark Van Doren Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Marjorie Perloff

Critical Essay by Marjorie Perloff

"Immortal," a typical poem from [Van Doren's second volume, Now the Sky (1928)], satisfies certain major New Critical criteria: it is an impersonal, well-crafted verbal complex, characterized by irony, wit, and organic metaphor. It impressed readers at the time as a characteristically "modern" poem; it displayed Frostian stanza form, diction, theme, indirection and understatement. But between Now the Sky and Good Morning almost fifty years intervene—years which have given us such seminal poems as Four Quartets, the Cantos, all of Stevens' post-Harmonium poems, Williams' Paterson, Crane's Bridge, Lowell's Life Studies, Plath's Ariel, O'Hara's Lunch Poems, Ginsberg's Howl, and Berryman's Dream Songs. Van Doren taught both Ginsberg and Berryman at Columbia, but as an artist, he seems wholly unaware that the bucolic, delicately ironic New England world of his early poems has become an anachronism. The counterpart of "Immortal" in Last Poems is "This Ground So Bare," which begins:

       This ground...
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