When Mark Van Doren delivered his first lecture at Harvard last February a capacity crowd jammed the hall. They filled every seat, every inch of floor space, window ledge and platform until the man at the lectern was practically engulfed Looking somewhat bewildered by the crush of humanity Van Doren stood quietly, hand touched lightly to his chin in a characteristic gesture.

He began to talk--lightly and humorously about his course, writing, life and letters. He smiled at his own stories and the class laughed with him. His eyes flashed around the room, and drew all his listeners into his presence. When he finished the assembled multitude roared their approval, and trundled off to classes, lunch, the library.

Almost four hundred students signed up the next week for Humanities 119--The Narrative Art--a course Van Doren devised in his last years at Columbia. Some say it is the best course they've ever taken, others that it is the loudest of the roaring guts. Whatever the consensus, the style and content of the course tell a great deal about this man who taught at Morningside Heights for almost 40 years and published close to 30 volumes of poetry, fiction, and criticism.

To Read Carefully

In simple terms Van Doren wants his students not only to read carefully but to think about the four masterpieces--The Odyssey, portions of the Old Testament, The Castle, Don Quixote--assigned in the course. He is a teacher. And like the best of teachers he knows that no student will fully grasp an idea or story until he has made it his own through active, even enthusiastic concern.

Of his lectures Van Doren said last week "I talk about the books professionally, like one writer to another. I try to tell the students how I have read the books. That's what criticism is." He tells the students to enjoy the books, to enjoy writing the short papers he requires on each reading assignment. One does not hear that around here often, but fun is a very important thing to Van Doren.

He believes deeply in the value of reading original work, and from the beginning was involved in the Great Books course at Columbia started by John Erskine. Two of his closest friends--Scott Buchanan at St. John's College and Mortimer Adler at Chicago--were leaders of the resurgent educational theory that all students should read certain books that form the core of a society's culture.

Living Masterpieces

When asked what he hoped a student would derive from his course Van Doren answered it all depended on "what is left in the mind of a student. If he is left with four masterpieces living in his mind, that's a hell of a lot."

In large part Van Doren has probably failed. Most students of Harvard measure the amount of effort they should put into a course by the number of books on the reading list or difficulty of the final exam. Maybe it is too much to expect more, and many people actually feel guilty for enjoying, or for reading only four books.

Perhaps that tells more about Harvard than about Van Doren. His vision of reading, and of education in general remains a noble one. For the few who understand it is a real and tremendously exciting one.

Van Doren's other life, his life away from teaching and criticism, is that of a poet. "The art of poetry I conceived to be the art of telling stories or otherwise rendering account of the single world all men inhabit" he writes in The Autobiography of Mark Van Doren. Thus his verse becomes a record of his life, both physical and mental. He wrote often of the war, of his family, of children, of love. Perhaps his richest subject matter is the country. He was born on a farm in Hope, Illinois and has spent much of his later life on a farm in Cornwall, Conn.

His poetry, like his Autobiography contains little blatant philosophizing. Both are journals of places seen, emotions felt, people known. If they carry one message it is the celebration of life itself, sensitivity to the simple things of this "single world."

Writing is one of his favorite topics of conversation. His amazing prolificness is testimony to his first statement about the subject that needn't be articulated: "I have no sympathy for people who say they have no time to writer. We don't have to do anything." He related how Shakespeare had left his wife and children to go to London to write. "It is absurd to say he shouldn't have done that" Van Doren said.

Approach to Teaching