Denise Levertov: A Poet's Life

Epilogue

epilogue 231 Epilogue [W]orks of art . . . are: testimonies of lived life. “Some Affinities of Content.”1 Denise Levertov wanted to be remembered for her poetry, the “autonomous structures” that would be appreciated on their own terms and would last. In comparison to her art, she considered her life fleeting and insignificant. As a consequence she was suspicious of biography and insisted that if a poet’s biography were to be written, it had to focus on the work itself. Even then she was leery of the genre and recoiled from it. Yet her actions suggest otherwise. She offered her archive to Stanford, although she claimed the sale of personal correspondence appalled her. She believed diaries were tools for self-reflection and hence private, at least while the author lived.2 Yet she knew her diaries contained reflections and rages, desires and longings, and even revisited them and made sidebar notations . She knew what was contained in her archive,3 and she surely must have recognized that future researchers would use these sources. In fact, occasionally she indicated she hoped they would.4 Ambivalent about biography as an aid to understanding her poetry, Levertov nonetheless claimed repeatedly that her poems emerged from her life experience. While she rejected confessional or self-referential writing, her poems, “testimonies of lived life,” reflect her dialogical engagement with the world around her. Two of her Stanford colleagues spoke directly to this issue of the unity of her life and work. “When a poet dies,” wrote Eavan Boland, “there is sometimes a rift between what they wrote and who they were. . . . Not so with Denise Levertov. I can think of few contemporary poets whose life and work were so connected.”5 John Felstiner called her one of the leading poets of the late twentieth century, whose influence would be felt for decades to come. “In my mind,” he said, “she was a unique presence because 232 epilogue in her more than any other poet I can think of, really since Yeats, everything came together in an organic whole—poetry, religion, history and politics, the natural world and people.”6 Although there is no inherent contradiction between believing that poetry stands independent of a life and is simultaneously inspired by life circumstances , more seems to be at stake in Levertov’s reluctance to have her life explored. She was adamant about her privacy, but, of course, she had much to be private about. Although she wrote a few autobiographical pieces and gave many interviews, in these contexts she could manage the outcome, either by limiting what she revealed or refusing to respond to questions posed by her interviewers, which she did on occasion. Because she carefully constructed an interpretation of her life, her ambivalence toward biography in part may have come from her reluctance to have that interpretation challenged . After all, biography, unlike autobiography or interview, cannot be controlled to the same degree by its subject. A biography tracks the arc of a life over many decades, narrating a story as a subject lived it temporally, appreciating flaws, misjudgments, and achievements. It then translates life into art, and in so doing preserves it. Without the unity biography brings to disparate facts, a life would devolve into its various parts and disintegrate. Biography’s mission is to rescue a life and make it accessible for future readers. The complex life of Denise Levertov is illuminated if one is able to grasp her self-created “myth.” That “myth,” both consciously and unconsciously, serves as her organizing principle of interpretation, giving unity to her life choices, making them intelligible and significant, and providing both inspiration and consolation. In this sense “myth” is a gloss on a life as well as an aspiration to be lived into and potentially realized by the subject. The leitmotif that runs through Levertov’s life is her vocation as poet, one chosen , gifted, and destined. She is not merely artist but “poet in the world,” one whose prophetic role is to “awaken sleepers.” At midlife this vocation is nuanced: she is a seeker. “I am,” she wrote, “by nature, heritage and as an artist, forever a stranger and pilgrim.”7 Her final vocational expression is as witness, one who reveals glints of mystery in persons—Julian, Brother Lawrence, Caedmon, and Romero—or in nature—in the mountain and “the poor grass returning after drought, timid, persistent.” It is to these various forms of wonder that she attests. If vocation is Levertov’s life “myth...