Mona Van Duyn

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Mona Van Duyn is a distinguished writer whose honors include a Bollingen Prize, a National Book Award, and a term as the United States's official poet laureate. "She is a poet of great wisdom, skill, and versatility," affirmed a contributor to Virginia Quarterly Review. Elizabeth Frank, meanwhile, described Van Duyn in a Nation appraisal as "a poet who usually tries harder than any of her contemporaries to coax affirmation out of the waste and exhaustion of modern life." Another enthusiast, Susan Ludvigson, wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that "Van Duyn's poems are about people—people whose ordinary lives include sickness and death, disappointment and despair, as well as faith and humor and love." Ludvigson added, however, that "the commonness of [Van Duyn's] subjects is misleading, for the poetry encompasses far more than such a catalogue suggests." To Ludvigson, Van Duyn's poetry constitutes "a generous mixture of the ordinary and the unusual, the natural and the sophisticated." Another writer, Doris Earnshaw, noted in World Literature Today that "we feel in [Van Duyn's] poetry the joy of the lighted water and the air," and Jane Augustine commented in Contemporary Poets that Van Duyn's poems "get 'down to the bone' of human experience." Van Duyn published her first poetry collection, Valentines to the Wide World, in 1958, and readily established herself as an authoritative presence. "Her voice is already assured," noted Ludvigson, "her manner confident." Joh

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