'The art of assisting discovery'

 

“The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.” –  Mark Van Doren

 

Born in Illinois on this date in 1894, Van Doren was a poet, creative and nonfiction writer, critic, scholar and English professor (at Columbia University for nearly 40 years).  As a teacher he inspired a generation of influential writers and thinkers, including Thomas Merton, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

 

 And, Van Doren was literary editor and film critic for The Nation, the oldest continuously published literary magazine in the U.S.   His influence and body of work were recognized by The Library of Congress when he was made a Fellow in American Letters and then elected President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  

Van Doren wrote many of the books studied by up-and-coming writers in colleges and universities across the nation, produced the award-winning verse play The Last Days of Lincoln, and won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his Collected Works 1922-1938, joining older brother Carl as one of the few sibling combinations to win the award (Carl won in 1939).  

Despite his many successes in other genres, he considered himself a poet first.   

 

“The job of the poet," he said, "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.”