Take, the Bollingen Prize (1971), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1989), and the Pulitzer Prize (1991) for Near Changes. She was the U.S. Poet Laureate between 1992 and 1993. Despite her accolades, her career fluctuated between praise and obscurity. Her views of love and marriage ranged from the scathing to the optimistic. In "What I Want to Say", she wrote of love: It is the absolute narrowing of possibilities and everyone, down to the last man dreads it But in "Late Loving", she wrote: Love is finding the familiar dear To See, To Take (1970) was a collection of poems that gathered together three previous books and some uncollected work and won the National Book Award for Poetry. In 1981 she became a fellow in the Academy of American Poets and then, in 1985, one of the twelve Chancellors who serve for life. Collected poems, If It Be Not I (1992) included four volumes that had appeared since her first collected poems. It was published simultaneously with a new collection of poetry, Firefall. In 1993, she was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996. She died of bone cancer at her home in University City, Missouri, on December 2, 2004, aged 83. Works Valentines to the Wide World (The Cummington Press), 1959. A Time of Bees (University of North Carolina Press), 1964. To See, To Take: Poems (Atheneum), 1970 —winner of the 1971 National Book Award for Poetry Bedtime Stories (Ceres Press), 1972. Merciful Disguises:: Poems Published and Unpublished (Atheneum), 1973. Letters From a Father, and Other Poems (Atheneum), 1982. Near Changes (Knopf), 1990 —winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Firefall (Knopf), 1992. If It Be Not I: Collected Poems, 1959-1982 (Knopf), 1994. Selected Poems (Knopf), 2003. References External links Mona Van Duyn Papers at Washington University in St. Louis — with brief biography Mona Van Duyn pages at Modern American Poetry, Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Mona Van Duyn at the Academy of American Poets Mona Van Duyn at the St. Louis Walk of Fame Mona Van Duyn Web Guide at the Library of Congress Mona van Duyn Biography and poems at the Poetry Foundation Formalist poets American Poets Laureate Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winners National Book Award winners Poets from Missouri University of Louisville faculty Washington University