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LIFE Van Duyn was born in 1921 in in St. Louis when they moved there in 1950. Van Duyn was a lecturer in the University College adult education program until her retirement in 1990. In 1983, a year after she had published her fifth book of poems, she was named an adjunct Professor in the English Department and became the "Visiting Hurst Professor" in 1987, the year she was invited to be a member of the National Institute Of Arts And Letters . Van Duyn was a friend of poet James Merrill and was instrumental in securing his papers for the Washington University Special Collections in the mid 1960s . She died of Bone Cancer , aged 83. CAREER Van Duyn won every major U.S. prize for poetry, including the National Book Award for Poetry for ''To See, To Take'' (1971), the Bollingen Prize (1971), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1989), and the Pulitzer Prize For Poetry for '' Near Changes '' (1991). 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'' was a collection of poems that, in 1970, 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. A recent 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 . BIBLIOGRAPHY
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