Mona Van Duyn

Mona Van Duyn (born May 9, 1921, Waterloo, Iowa, U.S.—died December 2, 2004, University City, Missouri) was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet noted for her examination of the daily lives of ordinary people and for mixing the prosaic with the unusual, the simple with the sophisticated. She is frequently described as a “domestic poet” who celebrated married love.

Van Duyn attended Iowa State Teachers College (now the University of Northern Iowa; B.A., 1942) and the University of Iowa (M.A., 1943). She taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop during the 1940s and later taught at several other universities and writers’ workshops. In 1947, with her husband, Jarvis Thurston, she founded Perspective: A Quarterly of Literature and the Arts, which she coedited until 1967. Her first volume of poetry, Valentines to the Wide World, was published in 1959. She won recognition following the publication of To See, to Take (1970), receiving the Bollingen Prize for achievement in American poetry (1970) and a National Book Award (1971).

Her other works include A Time of Bees (1964), Merciful Disguises (1973), and Near Changes (1990), for which she was awarded the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Firefall and If It Be Not I: Collected Poems 1959–1982 were published in 1993. From 1992 to 1993 Van Duyn served as poet laureate consultant in poetry of the United States. (She was the first woman to hold that title after it was created in 1985, though several other women preceded her in the role, which had been established in the 1930s under the title of consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress.)

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Van Duyn used wry humour, insight, irony, and technical skill to find meaning and possibility in a merciless world. She found in love and art the possibility of redemption—“but against that rage slowly may learn to pit / love and art, which are compassionate.” Van Duyn’s work is filled with literary references, as in “Leda Reconsidered,” a response to W.B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” and in “An Essay on Criticism,” which employs the genre and heroic couplets of Alexander Pope. Her characteristic use of formal verse sets her apart from many of her contemporaries. In “Since You Asked Me…,” she explained:

Why rhyme?
To say I love you to language, especially now
that its only viable components seem to be
“like,” “y’know?,” and “Wow”!

and

It’s a challenge to chaos hurled.
Why use it? Why, simply
to save the world.

She defended her use of metre as “not just style but lifestyle.”