Denise Levertov (1923-1997). Biography and creative work

Born in Ilford, Essex, England, Denise Lever- tov never understood the success that resulted from her living and writing in America. Rather, she arrived at the “American” idiom through a conscious effort to listen to and read distinctly American voices. In a 1965 interview with Walter Sutton, she expressed her awareness of that process: “I had to accustom my ears to American speech and my whole nervous system to the pace of American life before it really began to come through to me” (“A Conversation” 5). Despite living more than half her life in the United States, however, she never considered herself fully assimilated.

Her varied background and heritage help explain some of the ambivalence she felt in regard to claiming a nationality, a home, or even a single cultural foundation. She was born on October 24, 1923, to a Welsh mother, Beatrice Spooner, who was the daughter of a tailor and preacher, and a Russian Jewish father, Paul Philip Levertoff, who converted to Christianity and later became an Anglican clergyman. Denise changed the spelling of her family name to avoid confusion with her sister, Olga, also a poet. Denise Levertov came to life under the care and influence of parents who held diverse and politically sensitive views of the world. Besides having non-English parents, Levertov did not share with other British children in the experience of an English education.

Except for ballet lessons, Levertov was educated at home by her parents until she was 12, after which she mostly educated herself by reading many of the books the Levertoffs had in their substantial collection and by visiting museums. As she suggested in a 1979 interview with Kenneth John Atchity, “Perhaps you could say I am a child of the London streets, I am a child of the Victoria and Albert Museum, I am a child of my mother’s girlhood memories of Wales, I am a child of my father’s Hasidic tales, I am a child of the Christian upbringing that I had” (“A Conversation” 103). Indeed, all of those childhood influences affected her poetry.

Although Levertov did not attend school as a child, her parents did expect their daughter eventually to attend university. World War II, however, led her to work through her twenties as a civilian nurse in London. After the war she took odd jobs in the city until she worked again as a nurse in Paris, France. Although the war interrupted her informal education and prevented a formal one, Levertov developed her artistic sensibilities during those years. Encouraged by her elder sister, Olga, she devoted considerable energy to dance, learned to paint, and, perhaps most significantly, wrote poetry. At the age of 12 she sent T. S. Eliot a sample of her poems. He responded with a letter of support in which he advised her to learn to read poetry in a second language, as she later did. At age 17 she published her first poem, “Listening to Distant Guns,” in Poetry Quarterly, and at age 23 she published her first book of poetry, The Double Image.

Her early “British” work received critical praise and was even anthologized in Kenneth Rexroth’s New British Poets (1948), yet the influential life experience for the development of her poetry did not occur until 1948: She left behind the English literary scene, which, as she described to William Packard, “was in the doldrums,” and moved with her husband, Mitch Goodman, to New York City. The move slowed her youthful productivity considerably as she adjusted to a new culture, learned a new style of speech, and raised her son, Nikolai. She did not publish her next book until 1956. She did, however, immerse herself in American letters as well as literary and political life. Besides participating in the Ban the Bomb movement of the 1950s, she quickly became friends with poets such as Robert Creely, Robert Duncan, and, significantly, William Carlos Williams, who, more than any other poet, became a mentor to Levertov.

As she many times commented, Williams’s poetry gave her a way to cope with American speech patterns. His work invited her to look at poetry in a new light while affirming some of the already established poetic beliefs she held. She read Williams’s In the American Grain while traveling around Europe with her husband, supported by the American G.I. Bill. She immediately sensed the importance of the book and of Williams’s use of common idiom but did not know how, as she put it, to hear his poetry. After returning to the United States for an extended time and acquainting herself with American styles of speaking, she learned the cadences and rhythms of his voice. She later decided that the norm of poetic language must be the everyday use of language. As she explained in an interview with William Sutton, “It is a question of the individual’s idiom, of writing in your own language within your own or up to the limits of your own range of vocabulary, not in some preconceived literary language” (“A Conversation” 6).

Her ideas on “natural” poetic language, stemming from Williams’s influence, related to another of her defining poetic beliefs, that of organic form. She cited both T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative” and Williams’s dictum “no ideas but in things” as influential to her early writing practices. For Lever- tov this meant a discovery of structure through the close observation of objects. She clarified her position in an interview with Reid, explaining, “Rather than breathing life into dust, though, I see it as perceiving the life inherent in the dust” (Reid 71). Thus, she wrote poetry under the assumption that objects have intrinsic form and that a poem’s language and its structure can arise from that objective essence. She borrowed Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term inscape to describe the inner core that is part of an object. She called a poem attentive to an object’s “inscape” organic because it does not impose its own structure but rather adopts the object’s characteristic structure.

Her concern with organic form and natural idiom continued to inform her work, even as she and her critics began to discuss more frequently the abstract subject matter of her later poetry, which deals with the politics of war, feminism, and religion. After publishing several successful books of poetry in the United States and winning awards, critical recognition, popular praise, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Levertov began teaching. She took her first position in 1964 at the Young Men’s and Women’s Christian Association Poetry Center in New York City. That same year she became an honorary scholar at Rad- cliffe Institute for Independent Study, and by 1965 she was teaching at City College of New York and at Drew University, in Madison, New Jersey. In the following years she taught at a number of different institutions for higher education, ranging from Tufts University in Massachusetts to the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her continuous output of critically acclaimed poetry, Levertov taught, enabling her to get to know students and participate in student life.

The vibrant and active student population of the 1960s fed her social activism during a time of particularly heated political protest in America. In a discussion of the influence that teaching had on her writing, she explained to William Packard, “It’s had a profound effect on my life in bringing me into contact with the student generation, and with political activism on the various campuses. If I hadn’t been teaching I might easily have found myselfvery isolated politically, and perhaps would not have developed” (“Craft Interview” 37). Her political development led to increased involvement throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Among other forms of activism, she coinitiated the movement of Writers and Artists Protest against the war in Vietnam, traveled to Hanoi with fellow poet Muriel Rukeyser, and participated in an antidraft organization called RESIST, which eventually led to her husband’s arrest. Throughout her years of protest she continued to write; her poetry became increasingly fixated on political issues, especially the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Many critics point out that Levertov’s moralizing in the face of bloodshed was not new to her in the 1960s and 1970s. Even her first published poem observed, “That low pulsation in the east is war,” hinting at the stance of pacifism she later took (Selected Poems 1). The sound of distant guns, however, seems to have grown closer to Levertov and to her poetry. By 1967 the sense of “sad expectancy” found in her earlier poetry turned to disdain for explicit violence: “burned human flesh is smelling in Viet Nam as I write,” she declares in a poem called “Life at War” (Selected Poems 65). As Levertov publicly denounced political violence, her tendency to speak out against social failures led her writing away from the subject matter that made her famous— those mundane objects within which she found life.

Naturally, not every one of her early supporters cared for her development as a protest poet. In contrast to her generally acclaimed early works, the poetry Levertov published after 1967 became the subject of divisive debate among friends, fans, and critics. Some considered the obviously left-leaning outcries against the Vietnam War preachy, overly sentimental, and even bombastic. One critic, Paul Bres- lin, wrote in an essay for Poetry magazine that “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” (163). Even her good friend and fellow poet Robert Duncan reacted to some of her particularly harsh war imagery by asking, “What is going on?” The comment led to a falling out between the two, who had been closely associated through their work and their friendship.

Levertov admitted that she sometimes published only “sort-of” poems. She cited one example in particular from her book Candles in Babylon, called “A Speech: For Antidraft Rally, D.C., March 22, 1980.” She was aware of the criticism she opened herself up to, saying in an interview with Penelope Moffet, “I’m sure it’s not going to help my reputation any. If any reviewer wants to criticize that book when it comes out, they’ve got an obvious place to begin—‘well, it’s not poetry, this ranting and roaring and speechmaking’” (Moffet 122). And although many critics did in fact level such criticism, Levertov never apologized for the strong political nature of her poems. She traced her social awareness to her upbringing and continued to insist that she would never use poetry itself to further a political agenda. Rather, as she said in an interview with Joan F. Hallisey, Levertov worked “through poetry, to stir others’ minds or to articulate what readers feel but have not found words for” (“Invocations of Humanity” 145).

After divorcing her husband and during the post-Vietnam War period, Levertov turned toward religion. Although her parents had raised her in a spiritually rich household, it was not until the early 1980s that her work took on explicitly religious overtones. With poems such as “Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus” and “‘In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being’” she drew Christianity into her work and recognized God as “the air enveloping the whole / globe of being” (Selected Poems 194).

Rather than giving up on social activism to deal with exclusively spiritual matters, she joined religion and politics, as El Salvador: Requiem and Invocation, her 1983 libretto with music by W. Newell Hendricks, attests. Religion for Levertov did not mean having an unquestioning faith. It did, however, aid her in regaining perspective on the splendor of life while also continuing her humanistic project through poetry. As she explained to Lorrie Smith, “I now define myself as a Christian, but not a very orthodox one, and I think that there is a way of looking at Christian faith as involving the cooperation of man” (“An Interview” 141). Throughout her career, Levertov’s poetry developed according to her interests. Just as she insisted, however, there was no disconnection between her life and her writing nor between one period of her poetry and another. Estrangement from dominant social practices during the 1960s and 1970s did not interrupt her concern with organic form any more than her interest in Christianity estranged her from political awareness.

When she died in Seattle, Washington, in 1997 of complications of lymphoma, she had melded European, British, American, Christian, and Jewish personal history and life experience. She admitted late in her life that her diction was often closer to British than American English and that her sentiments for the “mother land” never faded. Yet Levertov remained a hugely influential poet in the United States, known for her complex sense of rhythm, experiments in form, and precise language. It is exactly that sense of complexity in her life and her poetry, the fact that she was and is “many things and no one thing,” that established her as a prominent author and that continues to intrigue readers today (Sutton, “A Conversation” 4).