Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern. Today is

Tuesday, May 19th, 2020. And today's poem is from an American poet who is perhaps better known

as kind of a literary critic, a figure in the world of teaching and criticism and the nonfiction

writing. And his name is Mark Van Doren.

And I'm here with a couple of my friends, Heidi White, Tim McIntosh.

We are getting ready to record the Close Reeds podcast and figured we'd talk about this poem for a few minutes.

Heidi, Tim, first of all, thanks for joining me to talk about some poetry.

Thanks, David.

Oh, it's good to be here.

Yeah.

So have either of you read or at least heard of Mark Van Doren before?

I've heard of him, but not read much.

No.

I've heard of him also because he was friends with Mortimer Adler.

I always get he and Charles Van Dore confused,

but the Van Dorn family is kind of this prominent literary household in the eastern U.S.

Yeah, so he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 for his collected poems 1922 through 1938.

And his brother, I believe it's his brother, actually won the Pulitzer Prize for biography the year before in 1939.

He wrote a biography of Benjamin Franklin.

So the two Van Doren brothers won the Pulitzer Prize or a Pulitzer Prize in back-to-back

years in 1939 and 1940.

So you are not kidding about them being, you know, a prime literary family in the East Coast.

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