The New Criterion is probably more consistently worth reading than any other magazine in English.
FeaturesMay 2006 Mark Van Doren & American classicism by Jeffrey Hart A student and friend remembers the critic. 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 American literature (or as one, in many ways, who was quintessentially American). Soon I learned that he was a man of the Butler frieze, who had written that “a classic is always fresh, vernacular, sensible, and responsible,” and who had elaborated: This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 24 May 2006, on page 22 Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Mark-Van-Doren---American-classicism-2403
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by Donald Kagan Upon his retirement from Yale, Donald Kagan considers the future of liberal education in this farewell speech. If you see something, say nothing Changes to the AP stylebook show that we’re blinding ourselves to the connections between Islamic extremism and terrorism. Webcasts
Andrew C. McCarthy talks Islam
Poet George Green reads from his award-winning Lord Byron's Foot
Celebration of the Life of Robert H. Bork, 1927–2012 |
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