SOURCE: "The Teeming Catalogue," in Poetry, Vol. 96, No. 1, April, 1960, pp. 47-51.

In the following excerpt, Woods surveys some of the poems in Valentines to the Wide World.

Mona Van Duyn appears to be a fully-engaged poet. She is not the house organ of any special lobby, but is trying on several attitudes, several voices [in Valentines to the Wide World].

About poetry she writes:

    But what I find most useful is the poem. To find
    some spot on the surface and then bear down until
    the skin can't stand the tension and breaks under it …
 
                    Only the poem
    is strong enough to make the initial rupture …
    And I've never seen anything like it for making you think
    that to spend your life on such old premises is a privilege.

I am sure that some of her passages are mistakes. In Part Three of "To My Godson, On His...