| Author Quoted | Mark Van Doren |
| Title Quoted | Selected Poems |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1954/10/16 |
| Imprint | New York : Holt. 1954 |
| Quotation | At last it is raining and I not only have the time to write a letter but am more or less in a mood for one. So after a long delay I thank you for Selected Poems which was a very pleasant surprise. I was really happy to have it. Fr. Matthew [McGunigle] and I had been cooking up a plot to ask you for some books of verse of yours, and then this came. Now he has it, but before he took it I had time to dig into Winter Diary, which I had never read, and to re-read so many other favorites. I still like your sonnets best. And I want to use one of the later short pieces ("If they could speak") in a book I have been writing this fall, which is all about man being in the image and likeness of God. It is largely about Adam, and the poem would come in where I talk about him naming the animals. The book is called (so far) "Existential Communion" [eventually published as The New Man]. It is about the business of "coming to oneself" and "awakening" out of the inexistential torpor that most people live in, and finding one's real identity"”in God. |
| Quotation Source | The Road to Joy: Letters to New and Old Friends.; Edited by Robert E. Daggy. / [S.l.] : Flame. 1990, p. 26 |
| Letter to | Mark Van Doren |
| Notes | |
| Link to Merton's Copy |
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