More on Denise Levertov poems, vids, essays:
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Denise Levertov (1923–1997) |
Opening Words
by Denise Levertov
I believe the earth
exists, and
in each minim mote
of its dust the holy
glow of thy candle.
Thou
unknown I know,
thou spirit,
giver,
lover of making, of the
wrought letter,
wrought flower,
iron, deed, dream.
Dust of the earth,
help thou my
unbelief. Drift
gray become gold, in the beam of
vision. I believe with
doubt. I doubt and
interrupt my doubt with belief. Be,
beloved, threatened world.
Each minim
mote.
Not the poisonous
luminescence forced
out of its privacy,
The sacred lock of its cell
broken. No,
the ordinary glow
of common dust in ancient sunlight.
Be, that I may believe. Amen.
by Denise Levertov
I know this happiness
is provisional:
the looming presences—
great suffering, great fear—
withdraw only
into peripheral vision:
but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:
this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky:
this need to dance,
this need to kneel:
this mystery:
“And I walked naked
from the beginning
breathing in
my life,
breathing out
poems,
arrogant in innocence.”
–from “A Cloak”
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| Poet Denise Levertov |
Poet Denise Levertov was born in 1923 in London and educated at home by her mother. Her formal education ended at age twelve, though she studied ballet for a time thereafter and was a lifelong autodidact and student of the arts, literature and languages. Her first book of poems, The Double Image, was published by Cresset Press, London in 1946 and in 1948 she came to the U.S. as the wife of Mitchell Goodman, who had been studying in Europe on the G.I. Bill.
Levertov was introduced to the American reading public through The New British Poets, an anthology edited by Kenneth Rexroth and published by New Directions. From the early 1950s, she and her husband were political and antiwar activists. Levertov taught at University of Massachusetts, Boston, Tufts University, and at Brandeis. For a time, she taught part of the year at Brandeis and the other part at Stanford University, which she also received tenure from. Along with the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award in poetry and the Lannan Prize, she won the 1996 Governor’s Writers Award, from the Washington State Commission for the Humanities. She died of lymphoma on December 20, 1997, in Seattle and is survived by her son Nikolai Goodman. Levertov published more than thirty books with New Directions.
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| Poet Denise Levertov |
Denise Levertov was a famous british-born american poet. When she was five years old she declared she would be a writer. At the age of 12, she sent some of her poems to T. S. Eliot, who replied with a two-page letter of encouragement. In 1940, when she was 17, Levertov published her first poem. During the Blitz, Levertov served in London as a civilian nurse. Her first book, The Double Image, was published six years later. In 1947, she met and married American writer Mitchell Goodman and moved with him to the United States the following year. Although Levertov and Goodman would eventually divorce in 1975, they did have one son, Nikolai, together and lived mainly in New York City, summering in Maine. In 1955, she became a naturalised American citizen.
Levertov's first two books had comprised poems written in traditional forms and language. But as she accepted the US as her new home and became more and more fascinated with the American idiom, she began to come under the influence of the Black Mountain poets and most importantly William Carlos Williams. Her first American book of poetry, Here and Now, shows the beginnings of this transition and transformation. Her poem With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads established her reputation. Levertov wrote and published 24 books of poetry, and also criticism and translations. She also edited several anthologies. Among her many awards and honours, she received the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Frost Medal the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Lannan Award, a Catherine Luck Memorial Grant, a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. From these 24 books, we have selected two dozen of her best and most beautiful poems from various topics especially religious which influenced more her life especially from her conversion from Jewish confession to Christianity.
by Denise Levertov
When I found the door
I found the vine leaves
speaking among themselves in abundant
whispers.
My presence made them
hush their green breath,
embarrassed, the way
humans stand up, buttoning their jackets,
acting as if they were leaving anyway, as if
the conversation had ended
just before you arrived.
I liked
the glimpse I had, though,
of their obscure
gestures. I liked the sound
of such private voices. Next time
I'll move like cautious sunlight, open
the door by fractions, eavesdrop
peacefully.
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| St. Thomas Didymus |
Denise Levertov Sings a Mass of
Doubt and Compassion
by John Randolph Bennett
February 16, 2015
If the divine ever manifests in our lives, does it arrive like a performance of Haydn’s “Creation” performed in a grand baroque church, twisting gold columns ablaze with slanting light while choirs and brass instruments amaze the air? Does it arrive like an unexpected footstep behind us on a gravel path, prefiguring a stern reckoning, a sober and exhaustive telling of wrongs? Or, more terrible, as a vision of hellfire and ruin thrust into our minds like a dagger that sets us wriggling and thrashing the bedsheets? Or, is it both uncanny and more ordinary, explicable in retrospect only as a miracle—the wallet found lacking a driver’s license but brimming with much-needed cash, the stranger who offers the ride on an empty road mid-deluge, the X-ray suddenly clear of a foreboding blot?
Or, more simply, does it arise as a kindling of compassion within ourselves? Is the divine, sometimes at least, a humble thing, quiet, dim, bestirring not angels nor rejiggering the universe’s set order of probabilities, but merely eliciting in our hearts graciousness and concern, a pressing need to care for others, including—the sweep of this question will to some seem blasphemous—even the divine itself?
I’m struck by two poems about doubt and the divine by Denise Levertov (1923-1997), a British-born American poet who converted to Catholicism late in life. Both poems concern St. Thomas Didymus, also known as St. Thomas the Doubter, the infamously all-too-human apostle who said, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
John 20 (KJV) tells the story:
24 But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.
25 The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.
26 And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you.
27 Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.
28 And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God.
29 Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.
I have to admit to always having felt ambivalent about this passage. I have no doubt that over two millennia John 20:29 has been quoted by countless rhetoricians of far less merit than Jesus to beguile rightfully skeptical people who received for their confidence something far less than eternal salvation. If you’re going to start a religion, or sell a miracle cure, or fund-raise for a mega-church whose pastor needs a private jet and Brioni suits for trips to Ghana, canonically extolling the virtues of those who believe soley on hearsay is a powerful rhetorical stroke.
Levertov converted to Catholicism late in life, so one might explain her sympathy with doubters by her having lived much of her adult life drifting between Christianity, Judaism, and a humanist mysticism, the drifting being evidence that none of these creeds proved to be thoroughly convincing and hence impervious to doubt. I suspect, though, that doubt is even common among life-long believers of a single faith (and a recent Pew survey found that doubt or disbelief is more common than one might expect across all religions). The human mind naturally circles, wanders, and probes, and life’s evidence often lands outside the tidy boundaries foretold by calculating philosophers and confident preachers. In this world, belief and doubt go together.
In her poem “St. Thomas Didymus,” Levertov describes Thomas confronting his doubt as he reaches his hand into Christ’s wound. In this poem, Thomas’s doubt is not shamed as the craven disbelief of a fallen soul spurning God:
But when my hand
led by His firm hand's clasp
entered the unhealed wound,
my fingers encountering
rib-bone and pulsing heat,
what I felt was not
scalding pain, shame for my
obstinate need,
but light, light streaming
into me, over me, filling the room
as if I had lived till then
in a cold cave, and now
coming forth for the first time,
the knot that bound me unravelling,
I witnessed
all things quicken to color, to form,
my question
not answered but given
its part
in a vast unfolding design lit
by a risen sun.
In this telling, Thomas is not shamed for his doubt, his “obstinate need” for physical proof of Jesus’ resurrection and divinity. Rather, his all-too-human doubt is “given its part” in a greater unfolding design. Receiving this gift, Thomas encounters—he “witnesses,” a verb that here straddles both awe and empiricism—a new world. He feels as though he is escaping a cold cave (which might be Plato’s cave or a burial chamber) to experience creation, marveling as the world assumes color and form in the light of a true, manifest sun. Doubt has been subsumed into a greater, glorious certainty.
For most of us, though, doubts persist. We can live long lives without experiencing any kind of glorious confirmation of a greater “unfolding design.” So let’s consider another of Levertov’s treatments of St. Thomas and doubt. She explored these themes in a longer poem, “The Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus,” whose six sections are named for parts of a Latin mass.
As with other masses, Levertov’s begins with a “Kyrie,” which traditionally is both an expression of thanks and an invocation of mercy. But this mass was written in the Cold War. The voices asking for mercy are filled with dread. The community may be the “first and last witness” of “the world’s death.” Whatever form mercy might take remains beyond the imagination of the community of believers, who lack the hard evidence of salvation inherent in a “vast, unfolding design.” Hope, therefore, can lie only in the unknown, in a salvation we can’t quite see clearly in the bleak world before us. And that same unknown harbors terrors. One can only ask for mercy.
We live in terror
Of what we do not know,
in terror of not knowing,
of the limitless, through which freefalling
forever,our dread
sinks and sinks,
or,
of the violent closure of all.
Yet our hope lies
in the unknown,
in our unknowing.
O deep remote unknown,
O deep unknown,
Have mercy on us.
In the next section, “Gloria,” the divine remains remote, though Levertov can sense its beneficial presence and power.
Praise
the invisible sun burning beyond
the white cold sky, giving us
light and the chimney's shadow.
Praise
god or the gods, the unknown,
that which imagined us, that stays
our murderous hand,
and gives us
still,
in the shadow of death,
our daily life,
and the dream still
of goodwill, of peace on earth.
The divine is so remote that Levertov cannot make out how many gods she should be invoking. (Like a drowning woman, she thrusts out her hand, regardless of just how many rescuers she may have glimpsed at the pond’s edge.) Whether one or many, only this indefinite divinity can stay mankind’s murderous hand. Whatever dreams of peace and goodwill we have, we have because they have been given to us.
In a traditional Mass, celebrants profess their beliefs, typically in the form of the Nicene Creed, in the “Credo.” For Levertov, even her profession of faith is riven with doubt. She writes:
I believe and
interrupt my belief with
doubt. I doubt and
interrupt my doubt with belief. Be,
beloved, threatened world.
...
Be, that I may believe, amen.
As it did for Thomas in the first poem, the created world caps her belief, but hers is not a glorious world secure in a greater, vast, sunlit design. Threats remain.
In the “Benedictus,” Levertov praises that which comes in the name of the spirit. The spirit manifests itself in the world around us: in the ordinary material world, in language, and even in the world of carnivorous beasts. Her tiger springs on its prey, but it is not greedy or scheming or cruel; it is simply responding to its natural hunger—its own needs and those of its young. This is a moderate tiger, and because it is moderate, it is moral.
Blessed is that which comes in the name of the spirit,
that which bears
the spirit within it,
The name of the spirit is written
in woodgrain, windripple, crystal . . . .
In the lion's indolence,
there spirit is,
in the tiger's fierceness
that does not provide in advance
but springs
only as hunger prompts
and the hunger
of its young.
And yet, despite nearly pantheistic manifestation of the divine, uncertainty remains. The word has become flesh (and woodgrain and windripple), but “in the blur of flesh, we bow, baffled.”
In the final section, “Agnus Dei,” the Lamb of God finally appears. It arrives not in triumph as an exemplary sacrifice empowered to set the world’s wrongs right and to illuminate the world with a dazzling clarity; no, it arrives instead as an object of pity. And we, recognizing the weakness and vulnerability of this still remote being (a “dim star” rather than a sun god), step forward as moral actors and rescue it. Finally we stay our own murderous hands and at last become care-givers of what we encounter. Experiencing God, we become merciful—to God and to creation.
Given that lambs
are infant sheep, that sheep
are afraid and foolish, and lack
the means of self-protection, having
neither rage nor claws,
venom nor cunning,
what then
is this 'Lamb of God?'
It is a creature:
With whom we would like to play,
Whom we'd lead with ribbons, but may not bring
into our houses because
it would soil the floor with its droppings?
Incontinence is not a lamb’s only shortcoming. It also lacks intelligence.
What terror lies concealed
in strangest words, Oh lamb
of God that taketh away
the Sins of the World: an innocence
smelling of ignorance,
born in bloody snowdrifts
licked by forebearing dogs
more intelligent than its entire flock put together?
Levertov asks:
is it implied that we
must protect this perversely weak
animal, whose muzzle's nudgings
suppose there is milk to be found in us?
Must hold to our icy hearts
a shivering God?
And she answers:
So be it.
Come, rag of pungent
quiverings,
dim star.
Let's try
if something human still
can shield you,
spark
of remote light.
Shielding a spark as though it were a flickering match about to blow out—the lamb of God is quivering like that. Within our cupped hands, we rescue God’s light from guttering out.
For Levertov, the divine manifests itself in this world not (or not always) an all-powerful God rescuing abject sinners, but rather as compassion rising in the hearts of mortals to care for whatever appears before them, which might just be a quivering lamb.
Why do I prefer this unorthodox scenario of God the rescued to the traditional scenario of God the rescuer, God the omnipotent, disappointed, and wrathful restorer of a world mangled by sinners? In part, it’s because over the years I’ve noticed that many of the people who thunder on about God’s power and majesty have hardened their hearts to anyone who doesn’t praise their particular manger in their particular way. While their mouths sing praises of a pure, kind-hearted lamb, their boots seem always to be seeking whatever unfamiliar or unrepentant dog they deem deserving of a kick. Whereas those people I’ve known who accept the “blur of flesh” and bafflement seem more readily to recognize and respond to those many dim stars around us that need shielding.
But we can examine Levertov’s cosmology systematically, too, setting aside personal reactions like mine to the religious and political shaming of the weak. Consider three possible relationships between God and humanity. In each, humanity has an obligation of gratitude and obedience to its Maker.
A wrathful God can order us to be compassionate. Our compassion, in this case, arises out of fear. We obey the commandments and muster compassion, while glancing behind us for thunderbolts.
A peaceful God can enjoin us to be compassionate. By imitating God who is compassionate to us, we learn to be compassionate to others. If we fail in our imitation, those around us suffer, but God, presumably, does not (except, perhaps, through sorrow).
In the third scenario, the Mighty becomes meek, and the responsibility for compassion is thrown entirely on us. We become the shepherd, finding the shivering, shit-smeared lamb in a snowdrift. We become the savior, saving the meek—not in any kind of Luciferian revolt, but through love. We rescue God, and the world saves itself. (As startling this idea might be to Christians, it’s hardly heretical to Buddhists.)
There’s no pride or defiance in this role. There is simply love, the love of “icy hearts” learning to thaw.
It’s a non-dualist vision of the world (or nearly so). God is close, and when pressed, our hearts discover after all that they can glow.
A Buddhist PostScript
On Facebook a few months ago, a Buddhist was describing how he explained Kuan-yin (Avalokiteshvara, a legendary bodhisattva revered as the manifestation of compassion) to prison inmates. In Buddhist art, Kuan-yin is sometimes pictured with a thousand arms.
“Why does she need so many arms?” one of the prisoners asked.
“Let’s see,” said the teacher, looking around the room and counting. “One, two. Three, four . . . .”
"She needs all those arms, because we who do the work of the goddess of compassion."
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Denise Levertov [Select] Poems
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| Poet Denise Levertov | Photo by Christ Felver |
Denise Levertov
1923–1997
During the course of a prolific career, Denise Levertov created a highly regarded body of poetry that reflected her beliefs as an artist and a humanist. Her work embraced a wide variety of genres and themes, including nature lyrics, love poems, protest poetry, and poetry inspired by her faith in God. “Dignity, reverence, and strength are words that come to mind as one gropes to characterize … one of America’s most respected poets,” wrote Amy Gerstler in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, adding that Levertov possessed “a clear uncluttered voice—a voice committed to acute observation and engagement with the earthly, in all its attendant beauty, mystery and pain.” Levertov was born in England and came to the United States in 1948; during her lifetime she was associated with Black Mountain poets such as Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley. Invested in the organic, open-form procedures of William Carlos Williams, Levertov’s body of quietly passionate poems, attuned to mystic insights and mapping quests for harmony, became darker and more political in the 1960s as a result of personal loss and her political activism against the Vietnam War. In Modern American Women Poets, Jean Gould called Levertov “a poet of definite political and social consciousness.” However, Levertov refused to be labeled, and Kenneth Rexroth once described her as “in fact classically independent.”
Levertov was born and raised in Ilford in Essex, England. Levertov and her older sister, Olga, were educated by their Welsh mother, Beatrice Adelaide Spooner-Jones, at home. The girls further received sporadic religious training from their father, Paul Philip Levertoff, a Russian Jew who converted to Christianity and subsequently moved to England and became an Anglican minister. Because Levertov never received a formal education, her earliest literary influences can be traced to her home life. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Carolyn Matalene explained that “the education [Levertov] did receive seems, like Robert Browning‘s, made to order. Her mother read aloud to the family the great works of 19th-century fiction, and she read poetry, especially the lyrics of Tennyson. … Her father, a prolific writer in Hebrew, Russian, German, and English, used to buy secondhand books by the lot to obtain particular volumes. Levertov grew up surrounded by books and people talking about them in many languages.” Levertov’s lack of formal education has been alleged to result in verse that is consistently clear, precise, and accessible. According to Doris Earnshaw, “Levertov seems never to have had to shake loose from an academic style of extreme ellipses and literary allusion, the self-conscious obscurity that the Provencal poets called ‘closed.’”
Levertov had confidence in her poetic abilities from the beginning, and several well-respected literary figures believed in her talents as well. Gould recorded Levertov’s “temerity” at the age of 12 when she sent several of her poems directly to T.S. Eliot: “She received a two-page typewritten letter from him, offering her ‘excellent advice.’ … His letter gave her renewed impetus for making poems and sending them out.” Other early supporters included critic Herbert Read, editor Charles Wrey Gardiner, and Kenneth Rexroth. When Levertov had her first poem published in Poetry Quarterly in 1940, Rexroth professed: “In no time at all Herbert Read, Tambimutti, Charles Wrey Gardiner, and incidentally myself, were all in excited correspondence about her. She was the baby of the new Romanticism. Her poetry had about it a wistful Schwarmerei unlike anything in English except perhaps Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach.’ It could be compared to the earliest poems of Rilke or some of the more melancholy songs of Brahms.”
During World War II, Levertov pursued nurse’s training and spent three years as a civilian nurse at several hospitals in the London area, during which time she continued to write poetry. Her first book of poems, The Double Image (1946), was published just after the war. Although a few poems in this collection focus on the war, there is no direct evidence of the immediate events of the time. Instead, as noted above by Rexroth, the work is very much in keeping with the British neo-romanticism of the 1940s: it contains formal verse that some considered artificial and overly sentimental. Criticism aside, Gould said The Double Image revealed one thing for certain: “the young poet possessed a strong social consciousness and … showed indications of the militant pacifist she was to become.” Critics detected the same propensity for sentimentality in Levertov’s second collection, Here and Now (1957), considered to be her first “American” book.
Levertov came to the United States after marrying American writer Mitchell Goodman, and she began developing the style that was to make her an internationally respected American poet. Some critics maintain that her first American poetry collection, Here and Now, contains vestiges of the sentimentalism that characterized her first book, but for some, Here and Now displays Levertov’s newly found American voice. Rexroth, for one, insisted in his 1961 collection of essays titled Assays that “the Schwarmerei and lassitude are gone. Their place has been taken by a kind of animal grace of the word, a pulse like the footfalls of a cat or the wingbeats of a gull. It is the intense aliveness of an alert domestic love—the wedding of form and content. … What more do you want of poetry? You can’t ask much more.” Gould claimed that by the time With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1959) was published, Levertov was “regarded as a bona fide American poet.”
Levertov’s American poetic voice was, in one sense, indebted to the simple, concrete language and imagery, and also the immediacy, characteristic of Williams. Accordingly, Ralph J. Mills Jr. remarked in his essay in Poets in Progress that Levertov’s verse “is frequently a tour through the familiar and the mundane until their unfamiliarity and otherworldliness suddenly strike us. … The quotidian reality we ignore or try to escape, … Levertov revels in, carves and hammers into lyric poems of precise beauty.” In turn, Midwest Quarterly reviewer Julian Gitzen explained that Levertov’s “attention to physical details [permitted her] to develop a considerable range of poetic subject, for, like Williams, she [was] often inspired by the humble, the commonplace, or the small, and she [composed] remarkably perceptive poems about a single flower, a man walking two dogs in the rain, and even sunlight glittering on rubbish in a street.”
In another sense, Levertov’s verse exhibited the influence of the Black Mountain poets, such as Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley, whom Levertov met through her husband. Cid Corman was among the first to publish Levertov’s poetry in the United States in Origin in the 1950s. Unlike her early formalized verse, Levertov now gave homage to the projectivist verse of the Black Mountain era, whereby the poet “projects” through content rather than through strict meter or form. Although Levertov was assuredly influenced by several renowned American writers of the time, Matalene believed Levertov’s “development as a poet [had] certainly proceeded more according to her own themes, her own sense of place, and her own sensitivities to the music of poetry than to poetic manifestos.” Indeed, Matalene explained that when Levertov became a New Directions author in 1959, it was because editor James Laughlin had detected in Levertov’s work her own unique voice.
With the onset of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam during the 1960s, Levertov’s social consciousness began to more completely inform both her poetry and her private life. With Muriel Rukeyser and several other poets, Levertov founded the Writers and Artists Protest against the War in Vietnam. She took part in several anti-war demonstrations in Berkeley, California, and elsewhere, and was briefly jailed on numerous occasions for civil disobedience. In the ensuing decades she spoke out against nuclear weaponry, American aid to El Salvador, and the Persian Gulf War. The Sorrow Dance (1967), Relearning the Alphabet (1970), To Stay Alive (1971), and, to an extent, Candles in Babylon (1982), as well as other poetry collections, address many social and political themes such as the Vietnam War, the Detroit riots, and nuclear disarmament. Her goal was to motivate others into an awareness of these various issues, particularly the Vietnam War and ecological concerns.
In contrast with the generally favorable criticism of her work, contemporary commentators tended to view Levertov’s overtly political poems skeptically, often noting that they resembled prose more than poetry. In Contemporary Literature, Marjorie G. Perloff wrote: “It is distressing to report that … Levertov’s new book, To Stay Alive, contains a quantity of bad confessional verse. Her anti-Vietnam War poems, written in casual diary form, sound rather like a versified New York Review of Books.” And Matalene noted that “To Stay Alive is a historical document and does record and preserve the persons, conversations, and events of those years. Perhaps, as the events recede in time, these poems will seem true and just, rather than inchoate, bombastic, and superficial. History, after all, does prefer those who take stands.” In a Poetry magazine essay, Paul Breslin stated, “Even in the early poems, there is a moralizing streak … and when she engaged, as so many poets did, with the Vietnam War, the moralist turned into a bully: I agreed with her horrified opposition to the war, but not with her frequent suggestion that poets are morally superior because they are poets, and therefore charged with lecturing the less sensitive on their failures of moral imagination.”
Contributor Penelope Moffet explained that in an interview with Levertov in Los Angeles Times Book Review just prior to the publication of Candles in Babylon, Levertov “probably would not go so far as to describe any of her own political work as ‘doggerel,’ but she does acknowledge that some pieces are only ‘sort-of’ poems.” Moffet then quoted Levertov: “If any reviewer wants to criticize [Candles in Babylon] when it comes out, they’ve got an obvious place to begin—’well, it’s not poetry, this ranting and roaring and speech-making.’ It [the 1980 anti-draft speech included in Candles in Babylon] was a speech.” Nevertheless, other critics were not so quick to find fault with these “sort-of” poems. In the opinion of Hayden Carruth, writing in Hudson Review, To Stay Alive “contains, what so annoys the critics, highly lyric passages next to passages of prose—letters and documents. But is it, after Paterson, necessary to defend this? The fact is, I think Levertov [had] used her prose bits better than Williams did, more prudently and economically … I also think that To Stay Alive is one of the best products of the recent period of politically oriented vision among American poets.”
Diane Wakoski, reviewing Levertov’s volume of poems Breathing the Water (1987), in Women’s Review of Books, stressed the religious elements in Levertov’s work. “Levertov’s poetry,” Wakoski stated, “like most American mysticism, is grounded in Christianity, but like Whitman and other American mystics her discovery of God is the discovery of God in herself, and an attempt to understand how that self is a ‘natural’ part of the world, intermingling with everything pantheistically, ecologically, socially, historically and, for Levertov, always lyrically.” Doris Earnshaw seemed to echo Wakoski in her review of Levertov’s volume A Door in the Hive (1989) in World Literature Today. Earnshaw felt that Levertov’s poems are “truly lyrics while speaking of political and religious affairs.” The central piece of A Door in the Hive is “El Salvador: Requiem and Invocation,” a libretto composed as a requiem for Archbishop Romero and four American women who were killed by death squads in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Emily Grosholz stated in Hudson Review that while this is “not a poem, [it] is a useful kind of extended popular song whose proceeds served to aid important relief and lobbying efforts; such writing deserves a place side by side with Levertov’s best poetry. And indeed, it is flanked by poems that rise to the occasion.”
In a discussion of Levertov’s volume Evening Train (1992), reviewer Daisy Aldan believed the “collection reveals an important transition toward what some have called ‘the last plateau’: that is, the consciousness of entering into the years of aging, which she [experienced] and [expressed] with sensitivity and grace.” Mark Jarman described the book in Hudson Review as “a long sequence about growing older, with a terrific payoff. This is the best writing she [has] done in years.” Evening Train consists of individually titled sections, beginning with the pastoral “Lake Mountain Moon” and ending with the spiritually oriented “The Tide.” In between, Levertov deals both with problems of personal conscience and social issues, such as AIDS, the Gulf War, pollution, and the ongoing threat of nuclear annihilation. Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Amy Gerstler stated that all of the poems “blend together to form one long poem,” and credited Levertov with possessing “a practically perfect instinct for picking the right distance to speak from: how far away to remain from both reader and subject, and how much of an overt role to give herself in the poem.” Aldan concluded that the poems in Evening Train “manifest a new modesty, a refinement, sensibility, creative intelligence, compassion and spirituality.”
In addition to being a poet, Levertov taught her craft at several colleges and universities nationwide; she translated a number of works, particularly those of the French poet Jean Joubert; she was poetry editor of the Nation from 1961-62 and Mother Jones from 1976-78; and she authored several collections of essays and criticism, including The Poet in the World (1973), Light up the Cave (1981), and New & Selected Essays (1992). Levertov’s essays ranged over poetics, aesthetics, and politics. According to Carruth, The Poet in the World is “a miscellaneous volume, springing from many miscellaneous occasions, and its tone ranges from spritely to gracious to, occasionally, pedantic. It contains a number of pieces about the poet’s work as a teacher; it contains her beautiful impromptu obituary for William Carlos Williams, as well as reviews and appreciations of other writers. But chiefly the book is about poetry, its mystery and its craft, and about the relationship between poetry and life. … It should be read by everyone who takes poetry seriously.” The essays in Light up the Cave, in turn, were considered “a diary of our neglected soul” by American Book Review critic Daniel Berrigan: “Norman Mailer did something like this in the sixties; but since those heady days and nights, he, like most such marchers and writers, has turned to other matters. … Levertov [is] still marching, still recording the march.” New & Selected Essays brought together essays dating from 1965 to 1992 and included topics such as politics, religion, the influence of other poets on Levertov, the poetics of free verse, the limits beyond which the subject matter of poetry should not go, and the social obligations of the poet. Essays on poets who influenced Levertov cover William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Mary Kaiser, writing in World Literature Today, said of the collection: “Wide-ranging in subject matter and spanning three decades of thought, Levertov’s essays show a remarkable coherence, sanity, and poetic integrity.” Booklist writer Ray Olsen concluded, “Next to poetry itself, this is ideal reading for lovers of poetry.”
Levertov’s 1995 work, Tesserae: Memories and Suppositions, contained 27 autobiographical prose essays. The title, “tesserae,” refers to the pieces that make up a mosaic, but as Levertov pointed out in her introduction to the work, “These tesserae have no pretensions to forming an entire mosaic.” Instead of a full-scale memoir, the pieces reflect distinct memories about the author’s parents, her youth, and her life as a poet. Reviewers remarked on the lyrical quality of Levertov’s prose and on her spare, contained memories. A Publishers Weekly reviewer stated that Levertov’s “ability to relate an incident is at once timeless and immediate, boundless and searingly personal.”
Levertov died of lymphoma at the age of 74. Almost until the moment of her death she continued to compose poetry, and some forty of them were published posthumously in This Great Unknowing: Last Poems (1999). The work, while retaining an elegiac feel, also displays “the passion, lyrical prowess, and spiritual jubilation” that informed the end of Levertov’s life, noted a reviewer in Sojourners. Noting that the book ranges from “the specifically personal to the searchingly mystical,” a Publishers Weekly critic felt that it rises “to equal the splendor of Levertov’s humane vision.” Posthumous collections of Levertov’s work include Poems: 1972-1982 (2001), The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams, edited by Christopher MacGowan (1998). The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, edited by Robert J. Bertholf and Albert Gelpi (2003) won the Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters.
Discussing Levertov’s social and political consciousness in his review of Light up the Cave, Berrigan stated: “Our options [in a tremulous world], as they say, are no longer large. … [We] may choose to do nothing; which is to say, to go discreetly or wildly mad, letting fear possess us and frivolity rule our days. Or we may, along with admirable spirits like Denise Levertov, be driven sane; by community, by conscience, by treading the human crucible.” A contributor in Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography commended Levertov for “the emphasis in her work on uniting cultures and races through an awareness of their common spiritual heritage and their common responsibility to a shared planet.”
* * * * * * * *
DENISE LEVERTOV
Jump to navigationJump to searchPriscilla Denise Levertov (24 October 1923 – 20 December 1997) was a British-born naturalised American poet.[3] She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Levertov's 'What Were They Like?' is currently included in the Pearson Edexcel GCSE (9–1) English Literature poetry anthology,[4] and the Conflict cluster of the OCR GCSE (9-1) English Literature poetry anthology, 'Towards a World Unknown.' [5]
Early Life and Influences
Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex.[6] Her mother, Beatrice Adelaide (née Spooner-Jones) Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales.[6][7] Her father, Paul Levertoff, had been a teacher at Leipzig University and as a Russian Hasidic Jew was held under house arrest during the First World War as an 'enemy alien' by virtue of his ethnicity. He emigrated to the UK and became an Anglican priest after converting to Christianity. In the mistaken belief that he would want to preach in a Jewish neighbourhood, he was housed in Ilford, within reach of a parish in Shoreditch, in East London.[6] His daughter wrote, "My father's Hasidic ancestry, his being steeped in Jewish and Christian scholarship and mysticism, his fervour and eloquence as a preacher, were factors built into my cells".[8] Levertov, who was educated at home, showed an enthusiasm for writing from an early age and studied ballet, art, piano and French as well as standard subjects. She wrote about the strangeness she felt growing up part Jewish, German, Welsh and English, but not fully belonging to any of these identities. She notes that it lent her a sense of being special rather than excluded: "[I knew] before I was ten that I was an artist-person and I had a destiny".[6] She noted: "Humanitarian politics came early into my life: seeing my father on a soapbox protesting Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia; my father and sister both on soap-boxes protesting Britain's lack of support for Spain; my mother canvasing long before those events for the League of Nations Union; and all three of them working on behalf of the German and Austrian refugees from 1933 onwards… I used to sell the Daily Worker house-to-house in the working class streets of Ilford Lane".[9]
When Levertov was five years old she declared she would be a writer. At the age of 12, she sent some of her poems to T. S. Eliot, who replied with a two-page letter of encouragement. In 1940, when she was 17, Levertov published her first poem. During the Blitz, Levertov served in London as a civilian nurse. Her first book, The Double Image, was published six years later. In 1947, she met and married American writer Mitchell Goodman and moved with him to the United States the following year.[6] Although Levertov and Goodman would eventually divorce in 1975, they did have one son, Nikolai, together and lived mainly in New York City, summering in Maine. In 1955, she became a naturalised American citizen.
Levertov's first two books had comprised poems written in traditional forms and language. But as she accepted the US as her new home and became more and more fascinated with the American idiom, she began to come under the influence of the Black Mountain poets and most importantly William Carlos Williams. Her first American book of poetry, Here and Now, shows the beginnings of this transition and transformation. Her poem "With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads" established her reputation.
Later life and work
During the 1960s and 70s, Levertov became much more politically active in her life and work. As poetry editor for The Nation, she was able to support and publish the work of feminist and other leftist activist poets. The Vietnam War was an especially important focus of her poetry, which often tried to weave together the personal and political, as in her poem "The Sorrow Dance," which speaks of her sister's death. Also in response to the Vietnam War, Levertov joined the War Resisters League, and in 1968 signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the war.[10] Levertov was a founding member of the anti-war collective RESIST along with Noam Chomsky, Mitchell Goodman, William Sloane Coffin, and Dwight Macdonald.[11]
Much of the latter part of Levertov's life was spent in education. After moving to Massachusetts, Levertov taught at Brandeis University, MIT and Tufts University. She also lived part-time in Palo Alto and taught at Stanford University, as professor of English (professor emeritus). There she befriended Robert McAfee Brown, a professor of religion at Stanford and pastor. Franciscan Murray Bodo also became a spiritual advisor to her. In 1984 she uncovered notebooks of her mother and father, resolving some personal and religious conflict. In 1989 she moved from Somerville, Massachusetts to Seattle, Washington, and lived near Seward Park on Lake Washington, with a view of her beloved Mount Rainier. On the West Coast, she had a part-time teaching stint at the University of Washington and for 11 years (1982–1993) held a full professorship at Stanford University, where she taught in the Stegner Fellowship program. In 1984 she received a Litt. D. from Bates College. After retiring from teaching, she travelled for a year doing poetry readings in the US and Britain. In 1990 she joined the Catholic Church at St. Edward’s Parish, Seattle; she became involved in protests of the US attack on Iraq. She retired from teaching at Stanford.[12]
In 1994 Levertov was diagnosed with lymphoma, and also suffered pneumonia and acute laryngitis. Despite this she continued to lecture and participate at national conferences, many on spirituality and poetry. In February 1997 she experienced the death of Mitch Goodman.[12] In December 1997, Levertov died at the age of 74 from complications due to lymphoma. She was buried at Lake View Cemetery in Seattle, Washington. Her papers are held at Stanford University. The first full biography appeared in October 2012 by Dana Greene Denise Levertov: A Poet's Life (Chicago: University of Illinois, 2012). Donna Krolik Hollenberg's more substantial biography, A Poet's Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov, was published by the University of California Press in April 2013.
Political poetry
Both politics and war are major themes in Levertov's poetry. Levertov was published in the Black Mountain Review during the 1950s, but denied any formal relations with the group. She began to develop her own lyrical style of poetry through those influences. She felt it was part of a poet's calling to point out the injustice of the Vietnam War, and she also actively participated in rallies, reading poetry at some. Some of her war poetry was published in her 1971 book To Stay Alive, a collection of anti-Vietnam War letters, newscasts, diary entries, and conversations. Complementary themes in the book involve the tension of the individual vs. the group (or government) and the development of personal voice in mass culture. In her poetry, she promotes community and group change through the imagination of the individual and emphasizes the power of individuals as advocates of change. She also links personal experience to justice and social reform.
Suffering is another major theme in Levertov's war poetry. The poems "Poetry, Prophecy, Survival," "Paradox and Equilibrium," and "Poetry and Peace: Some Broader Dimensions" revolve around war, injustice, and prejudice. In her volume Life at War, Levertov uses imagery to express the disturbing violence of the Vietnam War. Throughout these poems, she addresses violence and savagery, yet tries to bring grace into the equation, mixing the beauty of language and the ugliness of the horrors of war. The themes of her poems, especially "Staying Alive," focus on both the cost of war and the suffering of the Vietnamese. In her prose work, The Poet in the World, she writes that violence is an outlet. Levertov's first successful Vietnam poetry was her book Freeing of the Dust. Some of the themes of this book of poems are the experience of the North Vietnamese, and distrust of people. She attacks the United States pilots in her poems for dropping bombs. Overall, her war poems incorporate suffering to show that violence has become an everyday occurrence. After years of writing such poetry, Levertov eventually came to the conclusion that beauty and poetry and politics can't go together.[13] This opened the door wide for her religious-themed poetry in the later part of her life.
Religious influences
From a very young age Levertov was influenced by her religion, and when she began writing it was a major theme in her poetry.[9] Through her father she was exposed to both Judaism and Christianity. Levertov always believed that her culture and her family roots had inherent value to herself and her writing. Furthermore, she believed that she and her sister had a destiny pertaining to this.[9] When Levertov moved to the United States, she fell under the influence of the Black Mountain Poets, especially the mysticism of Charles Olson. She drew on the experimentation of Ezra Pound and the style of William Carlos Williams, but was also exposed to the Transcendentalism of Thoreau and Emerson. Although all these factors shaped her poetry, her conversion to Christianity in 1984 was the main influence on her religious writing. Sometime shortly after her move to Seattle in 1989, she became a Roman Catholic. In 1997, she brought together 38 poems from seven of her earlier volumes in The Stream & the Sapphire, a collection intended, as Levertov explains in the foreword to the collection, to "trace my slow movement from agnosticism to Christian faith, a movement incorporating much doubt and questioning as well as affirmation."
Religious themes
Denise Levertov wrote many poems with religious themes throughout her career. These poems range from religious imagery to implied metaphors of religion. One particular theme was developed progressively throughout her poetry. This was the pilgrimage/spiritual journey of Levertov towards the deep spiritual understanding and truth in her last poems.
One of her earlier poems is "A Tree Telling of Orpheus" from her book Relearning the Alphabet. This poem uses the metaphor of a tree, which changes and grows when it hears the music of Orpheus. This is a metaphor of spiritual growth. The growth of the tree is like the growth of faith, and as the tree goes through life we also go through life on a spiritual journey. Much of Levertov's religious poetry was concerned with respect for nature and life. Also among her themes were nothingness and absence.
In her earlier poems something is always lacking, searching, and empty. In "Work that Enfaiths" Levertov begins to confront this "ample doubt" and her lack of "burning surety" in her faith.[14] The religious aspect of this is the doubt vs. light debate. Levertov cannot find a balance between faith and darkness. She goes back and forth between the glory of God and nature, but doubt constantly plagues her.
In her earlier religious poems Levertov searches for meaning in life. She explores God as he relates to nothing(ness) and everything. In her later poetry, a shift can be seen. A Door in the Hive and Evening Train are full of poems using images of cliffs, edges, and borders to push for change in life. Once again, Levertov packs her poetry with metaphors. She explores the idea that there can be peace in death. She also begins to suggest that nothing is a part of God. "Nothingness" and darkness are no longer just reasons to doubt and agonise over. "St. Thomas Didymus" and "Mass" show this growth, as they are poems that lack her former nagging wonder and worry.
In Evening Train, Levertov's poetry is highly religious. She writes about experiencing God. These poems are breakthrough poems for her.[14] She writes about a mountain, which becomes a metaphor for life and God. When clouds cover a mountain, it is still huge and massive and in existence. God is the same, she says. Even when He is clouded, we know He is there. Her poems tend to shift away from constantly questioning religion to accepting it simply. In "The Tide," the final section of Evening Train, Levertov writes about accepting faith and realizing that not knowing answers is tolerable. This acceptance of the paradoxes of faith marks the end of her "spiritual journey."[14]
Levertov's heavy religious writing began at her conversion to Christianity in 1984. She wrote a great deal of metaphysical poetry to express her religious views, and began to use Christianity to link culture and community together. In her poem "Mass" she writes about how the Creator is defined by His creation. She writes a lot about nature and individuals. In the works of her last phase, Levertov sees Christianity as a bridge between individuals and society, and explores how a hostile social environment can be changed by Christian values.[13]
Accomplishments
Levertov wrote and published 24 books of poetry, and also criticism and translations. She also edited several anthologies. Among her many awards and honours, she received the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Frost Medal, the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Lannan Award, a Catherine Luck Memorial Grant, a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Bibliography
Primary works
- The Double Image (London: The Cresset Press, 1946)
- Here and Now (San Francisco, Calif.: City Lights Pocket Book Shop, The Pocket Poets Series: Number Six, 1956)
- Overland to the Islands (Highlands, N.C.: Jonathan Williams, Publisher, 1958)
- With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1959)
- The Jacob's Ladder (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1961)
- O Taste and See: New Poems (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1964)
- The Sorrow Dance (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1967)
- Relearning the Alphabet (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1970)
- To Stay Alive (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1971) ISBN 0811200876
- Footprints (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1972) ISBN 0811204553
- The Freeing of the Dust (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1975) ISBN 978-0811205818
- Life in the Forest (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1978) ISBN 978-0811206921
- Collected Earlier Poems 1940–1960 (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1979) ISBN 978-0811207171
- Pig Dreams: Scenes from the Life of Sylvia (Woodstock, Vt.: The Countryman Press, 1981), Pastels by Liebe Coolidge ISBN 978-0914378822
- Candles in Babylon (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1982) ISBN 978-0811208307
- Poems 1960–1967 (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1983) ISBN 0-8112-0859-1
- Oblique Prayers: New Poems (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1984) ISBN 0-8112-0909-1
- Poems 1968–1972 (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1987) ISBN 978-0811210041
- Breathing the Water (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1987) ISBN 978-0-8112-1027-0
- A Door in the Hive (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1989) ISBN 0-8112-1119-3
- Evening Train (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1992) ISBN 978-0-8112-1220-5
- A Door in the Hive / Evening Train (1993) ISBN 1-85224-159-4
- Sands of the Well (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1996) ISBN 0-8112-1361-7
- This Great Unknowing: Last Poems (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2000), With a Note on the Text by Paul A. Lacey ISBN 978-0-8112-1458-2
- Poems 1972–1982 (New York: New Directions Publishing, New Directions Paperbook NDP913, 2001) ISBN 0-8112-1469-9
Collections
- "The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov (NY: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 11/2013), Edited and Annotated by Paul A. Lacey and Anne Dewey, with an Introduction by Eavan Boland, Afterword by Paul A. Lacey & Anne Dewey ISBN 978-0-8112-2173-3
- The Life Around Us: Selected Poems on Nature (1997) ISBN 0-8112-1352-8
- Making Peace (NY: New Directions Publishing Corporation, New Directions Bibelot NDP1023, 2005), Edited, with an Introduction, by Peggy Rosenthal
- The Stream & the Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes (1997) ISBN 978-0-8112-1354-7
- Selected Poems (UK: Bloodaxe Books, 1986). ISBN 0-906427-85-1
- This is not to be confused with the 2002 US volume of the same title. From Neil Astley, of Bloodaxe Books:
- "Selected Poems (1986) had no editor as such: the book was edited by Bloodaxe Books in consultation with Denise Levertov, with helpful suggestions made by Linda Anderson and Cynthia Fuller. It was originated by Bloodaxe Books for publication in the UK and there was no corresponding US edition. It had no introduction or preface."
- Selected Poems (NY: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2002), preface by Robert Creeley, edited with an afterword by Paul A. Lacey
- New Selected Poems (UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2003), preface by Robert Creeley, edited with an afterword by Paul A. Lacey
- The latter two volumes are identical in contents. From Neil Astley, of Bloodaxe Books:
- "New Selected Poems was first published in the US by New Directions in 2002 under the title Selected Poems, and published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK in 2003 under the title New Selected Poems to avoid confusion with the previous UK edition called Selected Poems. It was edited with an afterword by Paul A. Lacy and has a preface by Robert Creeley. So it is the same book as New Directions' Selected Poems."
Prose
- The Poet in the World (NY: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1973) ISBN 0811204928
- Light Up the Cave (NY: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1981) ISBN 978-0811208130
- New & Selected Essays (NY: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1992) ISBN 0-8112-1218-1
- Tesserae: Memories & Suppositions (NY: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1995) ISBN 0-8112-1337-4
Letters
- The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams, Edited by Christopher MacGowan (1998).
- The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), Edited by Robert J. Bertholf & Albert Gelpi.
Translations
- Black Iris: Selected Poems by Jean Joubert (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1988), Translated from the French by Denise Levertov ISBN 978-1556590153
- In Praise of Krishna: Songs from the Bengali (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1967), Translated by Edward C. Dimock, Jr. and Denise Levertov, with an introduction and notes by Edward Dimock, Jr., Illustrated by Anju Chaudhuri
- No Matter No Fact (NY: New Directions Publishing Corporation, February 1988), Alain Bosquet, Translated by Samuel Beckett, Eduard Roditi, Denise Levertov, and Alain Bosquet ISBN 978-0811210393
- Selected Poems by Eugene Guillevic (NY: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1969)
- White Owl and Blue Mouse (Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 1991), Jean Joubert, Illustrations by Michel Gay ISBN 978-0944072134
Edited by Denise Levertov
- The Collected Poems of Beatrice Hawley, The (Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 1989), Edited and with an Introduction by Denise Levertov ISBN 9780944072080
- Out of the War Shadow: An Anthology of Current Poetry (NY: War Resisters League, 1967), compiled and edited by Denise Levertov
- Songs from an Outcast (Los Angeles, CA: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2000), John E. Smelcer ISBN 978-0935626452
References
Interviews
Bibliography
- A Bibliography of Denise Levertov (New York: Phoenix Book Shop, Paper, 1972), Compiled by Robert A. Wilson.
- Denise Levertov: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography (NY: Garland Publishing, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, Vol. 856, November 1988), Liana Sakelliou-Schultz.
Criticism
- Critical Essays on Denise Levertov (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall & Co., Critical Essays on American Literature, January 1991), Edited by Linda Wagner-Martin.
- Denise Levertov (DeLand, FL: Everett/Edwards, 1972), Charles Molesworth.
- Denise Levertov (NY: Twayne Publishers, Inc., Twayne's United States Authors Series 113, 1967), Linda Welshimer Wagner.
- Denise Levertov: In Her Own Province (NY: New Directions Publishing Corporation, Insights, Working Papers in Contemporary Criticism, Paper, May 1979), Edited by Linda W. Wagner.
- Denise Levertov: New Perspectives (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 2000), Edited by Anne Colclough Little and Susie Paul.
- Denise Levertov Revisited (Boston, MA: Macmillan Library Reference/Twayne Publishers, Inc., 30 July 1997), Diana Surman Collecott.
- Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, Paper, 1993), Edited, with an Introduction, by Albert Gelpi .
- Denise Levertov: The Poetry of Engagement (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Associated University Presses, Inc., March 1993), Audrey T. Rodgers.
- From Out of the Vietnam Vortex: a study of poets and poetry against the war (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1974), James F. Mersmann.
- A House of Good Proportion: Images of Women in Literature (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1973), Michele Murray.
- Levertov's Poetry of Revelation, 1988–1998: The Mosaic of Nature and Spirit (Athens, Greece: George Dardanos, Paper, June 1999/February 2002), Liana Sakelliou.
- Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1981), Cary Nelson.
- The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (NY: Oxford University Press, 1994), Edited by Ian Hamilton.
- The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (NY: Oxford University Press, 1995), Edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin.
- Poetics of the Feminine: Authority and Literary Tradition in William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies, March 1994), Linda A. Kinnahan.
- The Poetry of Politics, the Politics of Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, Paper, 2006), Edited by Albert Gelpi and Robert J. Bertholf.
- Poets in Progress: Critical Prefaces to Thirteen Modern American Poets (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), Edited by Edward Buell Hungerford.
- Revelation and Revolution in the Poetry of Denise Levertov (London: Binnacle Press, 1981), Peter Middleton.
- Understanding Denise Levertov (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), Harry Marten.
- Writing in a Nuclear Age (Hanover, NH: New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly: Distributed by University Press of New England, 1984), Edited by Jim Schley.
Biography
- Green, Dana. Denise Levertov: A Poet's Life (Chicago: University of Illinois, 2012). First full biography of the author. ISBN 978 0 252 03710 8
- Hollenberg, Donna Krolik, A Poet's Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 17 April 2013). More authoritative biography of the author. ISBN 978 0 520 27246 0
Further reading
Notes
- ^ "Search Results for England & Wales Births 1837-2006".
- ^ Notable American women: a biographical dictionary completing the twentieth century, Harvard University Press, 2004, p. 384.
- ^ "Denise Levertov", The Academy of American Poets
- ^ Pearson Edexcel GCSE (9-1) English Literature Poetry Anthology. Pearson Education Limited. 2014. ISBN 9781446913451.
- ^ "Towards a World Unknown" (PDF). Oxford, Cambridge and RSA Examinations. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 21 June 2019.
- ^ Jump up to:a b c d e Couzyn, Jeni (1985) Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe, p74
- ^ Levertov, Denise (1 January 1981). Light Up the Cave. New Directions Publishing. p. 238. ISBN 9780811208130.
- ^ Couzyn, Jeni (1985) Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe, p75
- ^ Jump up to:a b c Couzyn, Jeni (1985) Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe, p78
- ^ "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" 30 January 1968 New York Post
- ^ Barsky, Robert F. Noam Chomsky: a life of dissent. 1st ed. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1998. Web. <http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/chomsky/chomsky/4/5.html> Archived 16 January 2013 at the Wayback Machine.
- ^ Jump up to:a b "Denise Levertov: A Poet's Life."
- ^ Jump up to:a b Dewey, Anne. "The Art of the Octopus: The Maturation of Denise Levertov's Political Vision." Renascence 50 (1998): 65–81.
- ^ Jump up to:a b c Gallant, James. "Entering No-Man's Land: The Recent Religious Poetry of Denise Levertov." Renascence 50 (1998): 122–134.
External links
