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Article: Mark Van Doren & American classicism.
- Article from:
- New Criterion
- Article date:
- May 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Foundation for Cultural Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Above the columns of Butler Library at Columbia, inscribed in the stone frieze, you read permanent testimony that some writers are especially important: Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle, Milton, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, Spinoza. The names represent importance itself. Butler Library gazes out across a series of walks and terraces at Charles McKim's Low Library, which dominates the scene with its ten Ionic columns and its low dome, inspired by the Pantheon in Rome.
To my undergraduate gaze, no professor was more in harmony with all this than Mark Van Doren. In our first acquaintance I was not aware of him as a distinguished scholar and critic of ...