Mona Van Duyn, the nation’s first female poet laureate and a Pulitzer Prize winner, died Thursday morning at her home from bone cancer, her husband said. She was 83.
A writer of poetry since the second grade, Van Duyn published nine volumes of poetry and won a Pulitzer for “Near Changes” in 1991. The following year she became the sixth poet and the first woman named U.S. poet laureate, an eight-month position appointed by the Librarian of Congress since 1986.
“I know the Library of Congress has been embarrassed for not having a woman,” Van Duyn said at the time. “I think if I could convince them I was really a man, they would say, ’Don’t come.”’
After Van Duyn won the Pulitzer, Cynthia Zarin wrote in The New Republic: “Since 1959 Mona Van Duyn has been writing poetry notable for its formal accomplishment and for its thematic ambition. The searching intelligence of the persona we have learned to know in her poems, combined with the humor, technical ease, and the blend of the abstract and the quotidian that the poet has made her own have resulted in that rare good thing: a strong, clear voice, original without eccentricity.”
Van Duyn’s literary talents were quickly apparent to Jarvis Thurston, who married her months after they met in a writing class in 1943.
“When I asked to see some of her poems, I loved them immediately,” Thurston said Thursday. “She said, ‘You didn’t offer to marry me until you’d seen my poems.”’
Van Duyn won a National Book Award for her book of poems “To See, To Take” in 1971. The year before, she was awarded the Bollingen Prize from Yale University, one of many honors for her poetry.
Her other works include “Firefall” (1994), “Merciful Disguises” (1973) and “Bedtime Stories” (1972). Her first book of poetry, “Valentines to the Wide World,” was published in 1959.
Van Duyn was born in Waterloo, Iowa. She studied at the University of Northern Iowa and received a master’s degree from the University of Iowa in 1943.
Van Duyn was a member of the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis for decades, developing a reputation for strong instruction of young writers. Her husband is a former chairman of the English department.
Thurston, 90, said his wife stopped writing about eight years ago. He said she had a nervous breakdown in 1949 and struggled with psychiatric problems throughout her life, though he said she would go years at a time in good mental health. He said medication she was on made it difficult for her to continue with her work.
Van Duyn is survived by her husband, who said memorial arrangements were pending.