SOURCE: "Mona Van Duyn And The Politics of Love," in Ploughshares, Vol. 4, No. 3, March, 1978, pp. 3 1-44.

In the following essay, Goldensohn examines Van Duyn's treatment of love and the female domestic experience in her works.

A long time ago I watched Margaret Mead's film, Four Families, with a bunch of high school kids. While I sat there, wholly mesmerized by the dark flow of those domestic images with their latent and compelling content, the kids' responses had been quite different. "Is that all there is?" one prescient fourteen-year-old demanded: "Eating, sleeping, getting married, having kids and working?" The question is fair. Also a question that the very body of Mona Van Duyn's work tends to answer affirmatively; then, in a hundred fevers of dissatisfaction, ask again. Fortunately, question and answer are never so simple or final that we stop needing her additions and complications, or that large and...