Arts and Letters

Marianne Moore, in her precise and exquisite prose, asked difficult questions. "Must a man," she said, "be good to write good poetry?"

I say it is a difficult question. I mean it is difficult for us, not for Marianne Moore. Ours is a generation, a muddle of generations, which the word "good" embarrasses. We have told ourselves for the better part of a century that goodness is irrelevant to the rapidly changing world we live in. And even now that Watergate has taught us better we continue to insist that, in any case, goodness is irrelevant to the practice of an art. The implication of Marianne Moore's question, the implication that a man might be a bad poet because he is a bad man—because he is vain, vicious, perverted, dishonest, even vile—is, we say, no longer thinkable. Literally no longer thinkable. We are beyond all that. Humanity is beyond it. Poetry above all is beyond it.

But Marianne Moore with her candid and beautiful precision was not beyond it. "Must a man be good to write good poetry?" Her answer was: probably. "Rectitude," she said, "has a ring that is implicative." "With no integrity," she said, "a man is not likely to write the kind of book I read."

I repeat these words not because they dispose of the question or make the unthinkable thinkable: current criticism has yet to catch up with them. I repeat them because they make it possible to talk seriously and honestly of Mark Van Doren now he is dead.

Mark Van Doren was first and foremost and above all a good man, a man famous in his generation for his goodness, for his decency, for his rectitude. He was also a poet. But it would be a delusion to suppose, as the fashion requires, that his goodness was irrelevant to his poetry. On the contrary it was the quality of his goodness which made his poetry possible, as the most superficial reading of his poems will demonstrate. And the same thing is true the other way around. It was true of Mark Van Doren, as it was true of Emerson and Thoreau, that it was his poems which gave him his particular kind of goodness.

To take the poetry and the goodness apart, therefore, would leave little honest or serious to say about Mark Van Doren. He would become, as so many poets do in the current vocabulary, a merely literary figure, a paper man, a man interesting because he had written and read. It is true that Mark Van Doren had written: many books, most of them memorable. It is true too that he had read: he was, I suppose, the best-read poet of the century—at least in his own language. But to stop there would be to miss the whole point of his reading and writing. He read and wrote not for the sake of literature but for the sake of life—to learn life and live it as the men of Lorenzo's time had done and of Elizabeth's and, in this Republic, of Jefferson's. He read and wrote to be. To be what he, indeed, became.

What did he become? For one thing, the great teacher of his generation. Not because he had read and was learned but because he had read and had learned. The subject of his famous course at Columbia was not Shakespeare reflected in the triple glass of erudition but Shakespeare lived in a man's life. Which is why his students remembered that course when everything else was forgotten. To have read Shakespeare with Mark Van Doren must have been something like talking of Shakespeare with John Keats. To Keats too Shakespeare was someone he had just now left along the road.

But, great teacher though he was, it is the poet we have to do with here because the poet was the man and bore the vision and the vision is what matters in the end. Mark Van Doren's vision of the world was not a literary vision, a vision so divorced from the human need for seeing that it bears no witness, can be true or false or anything so long as it conforms to the demands of letters. He never accepted the dark night of the soul which has been a standard literary property for so many dwindling years. His vision was a vision of death AND life: of death as the end of life and life as the meaning of death.

A vision like that takes courage. Courage and love. The courage to believe in life and live it. The love that, having lived it, still believes. It takes a good man and a brave one, a man whose goodness can indeed make poetry, a man whose poems are the image of his goodness, to write a poem in this century like Mark Van Doren's poem which begins "O World, my friend, my foe…"

O world, my friend, my foe,
My deep dark stranger, doubtless
Unthinkable to know;
My many and my one,
Created when I was and doomed to go
Back into the same sun;

O world, my thought's despair,
My heart's companion, made by love
So intimate, so fair
Stay with me till I die…

O air,
O stillness, O great sky.