Mona Van Duyn, 83; U.S. Poet Laureate Won Pulitzer

Mona Van Duyn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and the first woman to serve as poet laureate of the United States, has died. She was 83.

Van Duyn died of bone cancer Thursday at her home in University City, Mo.

In a career marked by spurts of glory between periods of comparative obscurity, Van Duyn won every prize that a poet covets, including the National Book Award for Poetry, the Bollingen Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize, as well as the Pulitzer in 1991 for “Near Changes.”

“Mona got attention, but it was spasmodic,” said poet Richard Howard, who includes Van Duyn’s work in a modern poetry course he teaches at Columbia University in New York City.

Although she wrote of marriage, domestic life, family relationships and friendships, he said, she was “an acid-edged observer.”

In one poem, “What I Want to Say” (1973), Van Duyn refers to love as “harrowing” and warns readers:

It is the absolute narrowing of possibilities

and everyone, down to the last man,

dreads it.

Other times she was more optimistic: “Love is finding the familiar dear,” she wrote in the poem “Late Loving” (1992).

“Mona wanted to tell the truth in her poetry,” poet and essayist J.D. McClatchy said Friday. “She wrote about love not in the high, lyrical sense. It was more about how one lives in the world and lives in married love. She was a realist.”

Critics place Van Duyn in the league of James Merrill and Richard Wilbur. Like them she was a formalist, but she liked to bend the rules. She used rhyme eccentrically at times to make it sound off-key. She also explored poetry’s familiar categories, including sonnet, elegy and others, but gave them her own twist. She once wrote a sonnet about her kitchen sink, for example.

“Her style was an unfashionable one in the late ‘50s,” McClatchy said of the decade when Van Duyn published her first collection, “Valentines to the Wide World” (1959). “Poetry at that time was shifting into a shaggy, confessional style. Mona’s poetry maintained a formal rigor and complexity that has lasted better than the other.”

It was possible to follow Van Duyn’s life and lifestyle through her writing. She spent summers on the coast of Maine and wrote about blueberries, wood cabins and the wild moose that once stepped into her yard. At home in Missouri, she wrote about watching old movies on television and the earthquake that rattled her house one night.

When her parents were old and frail, Van Duyn took care of them, as she implies in “Letters From a Father” (1982), a poem in six parts. In the poem, Van Duyn takes her father’s letters and turns them into witty, acerbic, yet compassionate verses.

At first, the ailing father in the poem is full of complaints. Talking of a new bird feeder, he advises her:

You say you have a hundred sparrows, I’d buy poison and get rid of their diseases and turds.

She visits her parents and brings them a birdfeeder and a large sack of grain. Her father’s thank-you note reads: “A terrible waste of your money ... since we won’t be living more than a few weeks.” More letters follow: “Your mother hopes you can send us a kind of book that tells about birds.” And then:

I have six cardinals

three pairs, they come at early morning and night.

He goes on to describe eight varieties of sparrow.

Neighbors begin to visit and watch the bird show. A last letter ends on a high note: “They have birds in town but nothing to equal this.”

“So the world woos its children back for an evening kiss,” the poet observes.

Born in Waterloo, Iowa, Van Duyn graduated from the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls in 1942 and earned a master’s degree from the University of Iowa in Iowa City the following year.

She married Jarvis A. Thurston, a professor of English, in 1943 and began a career as a college professor, starting at the University of Iowa and moving first to Washington University in St. Louis and then to nearby University College. In 1947, she and Thurston founded the quarterly literary magazine Perspective, which she edited until 1967.

Her third collection of poetry, “To See, To Take” (1970), won the National Book Award for Poetry. She was named poet laureate of the United States in 1992. Her most recent book, “Selected Poems,” was published in 2002.

“The expression, ‘a poets’ poet’ exists for a reason,” McClatchy said of Van Duyn. “Some poets are known to other poets, more than to the public. Mona is known to poets.”

Van Duyn is survived only by her husband.