The poems of Mark Van Doren seem to be written in the rough music or muted undertone of a doubting intellect, the scraping, sad music of waves upon a rock barren of all but that dark music. But the imagery provides a mystical lighthouse evoking some altogether different world, even one which is acknowledgedly of the past, for many of the images relate to those things which, secular of nature, have disappeared or are about to disappear from a universe of the known objects into the unknown. Because of their being extinct in all but human consciousness which—if it is a poet's—has a remarkable power of retention and reproduction—or because they are already going, these most commonplace things are now rare, unique, lonely—and are hypostasized, in the poetry of Mark Van Doren, into a statement of divinity, an illusive substance more beautiful than the...