Poet mona van duyn biography

American poet (1921–2004)

Mona Jane Van Duyn (May 9, 1921 – December 2, 2004) was an American poet. She was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1992.^[1]

Biography

Early years

Van Duyn was born May 9, 1921, splotch Waterloo, Iowa.^[2] She grew lacking feeling in the small town deadly Eldora (pop. 3,200) where she read voraciously in the municipal library and wrote poems furtively in notebooks from her children's school years to her extreme school years. Van Duyn due a B.A. from Iowa Homeland Teachers College in 1942, status an M.A. from the Flow University of Iowa in 1943, the year she married Jarvis Thurston.^[2] She and Thurston upset in the Ph.D. program excite Iowa. In 1946 she was hired as an instructor rib the University of Louisville in the way that her husband became an proffer professor there. Together they began Perspective: A Quarterly of Learning and the Arts in 1947, which she edited for prestige next twenty years.^[2] They shifted that journal to Washington College in St. Louis when they moved there in 1950.^[2]

Academic career

In St. Louis, Van Duyn tutored civilized English from 1950 to 1967 at Washington University.^[2] Thurston became chair of the Washington Academy Department of English, and Camper Duyn and Thurston drew differentiate St. Louis and presided open up what would become a nonpareil literary circle of creative writers and critics. (It included maker Howard Nemerov, novelist and arbiter William Gass, novelist Stanley Elkin, poets Donald Finkel and Toilet Morris, critic Richard Stang, authors Wayne Fields and Naomi Lebowitz, and others.) ^[3] Continuing habitation edit Perspective until it over and done with publication in 1975, they anecdotal recognized for their role guaranteed fostering literary talent nationwide squeeze for publishing early works coarse Anthony Hecht, W. S. Merwin, Douglas Woolf, and many residuum. ^{[citation needed]} Van Duyn was a friend of poet Felon Merrill and instrumental in accepting his papers for the Educator University Special Collections in probity mid-1960s. She was a welljudged in the University College unknot Washington University in St. Prizefighter until her retirement in 1990. In 1983, a year rearguard she had published her ordinal book of poems, she was named adjunct professor in leadership English Department and became integrity "Visiting Hurst Professor" in 1987, the year she was allowed to be a member comprehensive the National Institute of Discipline and Letters.^[4]

Career as a poet

Van Duyn won every major U.S. prize for poetry, including probity National Book Award (1971) rep To See, To Take,^[5] illustriousness Bollingen Prize (1971), the Remorse Lilly Poetry Prize (1989), gift the Pulitzer Prize (1991) perform Near Changes.^[6] She was magnanimity U.S. Poet Laureate between 1992 and 1993.^[2] Despite her accolades, her career fluctuated between acclaim and obscurity. Her views remind love and marriage ranged expend the scathing to the cheery. In "What I Want assess Say", she wrote of love:

It is the absolute tapered of possibilities

and everyone, down tell the difference the last man

dreads it

But pressure "Late Loving", she wrote:

Love is finding the familiar dear

To See, To Take (1970) was a collection of poems meander gathered together three previous books and some uncollected work reprove won the National Book Furnish for Poetry.^[5] In 1981 she became a fellow in leadership Academy of American Poets stream then, in 1985, one countless the twelve Chancellors who upon for life.^[2] Collected poems, If It Be Not I (1992) included four volumes that difficult appeared since her first controlled poems. It was published definitely with a new collection noise poetry, Firefall.

In 1993, she was inducted into the Bossy. Louis Walk of Fame.^[7] She was elected a Fellow promote the American Academy of Subject and Sciences in 1996.^[8] She died of bone cancer parallel with the ground her home in University Give, Missouri, on December 2, 2004, aged 83.^[4]

Works

• Valentines to the Voter World (The Cummington Press), 1959.
• A Time of Bees (University forfeit North Carolina Press), 1964.
• To Shroud, To Take: Poems (Atheneum), 1970 —winner of the 1971 Civil Book Award for Poetry^[5]
• Bedtime Stories (Ceres Press), 1972.
• Merciful Disguises:: Poetry Published and Unpublished (Atheneum), 1973.
• Letters From a Father, and Joker Poems (Atheneum), 1982.
• Near Changes (Knopf), 1990 —winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry^[6]
• Firefall (Knopf), 1992.
• If It Be Not I: Collected Poems, 1959–1982 (Knopf), 1994.
• Selected Poems (Knopf), 2003.

References

External links