For three years, at the latter part of Mark’s teaching career, I managed to squeeze into a number of his popular courses: Shakespeare, the humanities section of Columbia’s core curriculum, a seminar on writing, and—most memorable—The Narrative Arts. One day in 1951, while discussing The Iliad, we couldn’t help noticing the guest who had come to audit the class. It was Dwight Eisenhower, then the university president and soon-to-be U.S. president. With a wry grin, Mark introduced him as being someone who knew a bit about warfare.

Not only was I fortunate enough to have studied with Van Doren, but toward the end of one semester, he remarked that it might be interesting for me, a city kid, to visit him at Cornwall Hollow. Wow. What would that be like? What would we talk about? It was one thing to take his courses—Newsweek called him a “living legend”—but it might be quite another to be his guest in the country. It turned out to be a blissful experience. Mark put me at ease, and I began to appreciate the transformative charm of his home’s natural surroundings, the relationship he had with the land.

Bits and pieces of that first visit still come to mind. From the outset, it was clear that Van Doren absolutely loved the area—in all its seasons. And that he had a special bond with his brother Carl, a Pulitzer Prize–winner himself for his biography of Benjamin Franklin, who lived with his family just a few miles away. Another of Mark’s neighbors, of whom he spoke very fondly, was author and New Yorker cartoonist James Thurber. We also talked about the “spiritual journey” of one of Mark’s former students, Thomas Merton, the renowned Catholic scholar, poet, and Trappist monk. And so it went—with his wife, Dorothy, an author and editor of The Nation, joining us for iced tea, cookies, and more conversation about books and authors. I was in heaven.

The afternoon drawing on, Mark and I hiked to a ramshackle old mill which housed his spartan workroom. Hanging crookedly on one wall was his Pulitzer, awarded in 1940 for Collected Poems—many of them written in that very room. In the comforting stillness of this private nook the only sound was that of a stream running swiftly under the mill. We strolled back toward the Van Dorens’ white-frame farmhouse, now deeply shaded by the huge maples that surrounded it. With Dorothy at his side (she was working, at the time, on a novel, The Country Wife) we said our farewells. I’ve never forgotten Mark’s genuine, unpretentious manner; he took me seriously—as if what I had to say mattered.

This was, of course, completely in keeping with his character. In a talk with Archibald MacLeish, recorded for a CBS documentrary, Van Doren had this to say: “I have always had the greatest respect for students. There is nothing I hate more than condescension—the attitude that they are inferior to you. I always assume they have good minds…. They have more experience than they are given credit for. They have been born, have had parents, brothers and sisters, have been in love, have been jealous, angry, ambitious, tired, hungry, happy, unhappy, and they have been aware, too, of justice and injustice.”

Ranked among “The Greatest Columbians,” Van Doren inspired literally thousands of young people who signed up—over nearly four decades—for his courses. There was something hypnotic about Mark’s sonorous, uninflected voice; his way of learning, along with you, as he delved into his favorite works. Legend has it that many scholars-to-be applied to Columbia simply because he was on the faculty. He sparked the imagination of legions of devotees who later become authors, editors, publishers, educators, journalists, and poets. And, more than likely, he left an indelible mark on all the others who took his courses—kids who wound up as lawyers, doctors, scientists. public officials, bankers, maybe even hedge-fund managers.

Many years after my encounters with Mark, I became acquainted with his grandson, Adam—a well-known architectural artist and documentary filmmaker. The son of John Van Doren, Mark’s younger son, Adam now lives in a splendid home he designed at the very top of the farmstead—still owned by the family after 85 years.

Mark’s destiny, it seems, was to come back to the land, to a place he rhapsodized in his 1958 autobiography and in countless poems. He died in 1972, aged 78, and was laid to rest in the cemetery of the Congregational Church in Cornwall. More than 600 people gathered in the small village for his funeral. Mingling with three generations of the Van Doren clan were educators, former students from around the country, the literary and intellectual elite, and his cherished friends and neighbors—farmers, merchants, workers, teachers—from nearly every walk of life. Cornwall’s pubic school was closed for the day. Nobody could remember if that had ever happened before.

By Nick Wedge