Poet, Word, and World: Reality and Transcendence in the Work of Denise Levertov

Language is the only Homeland.

CZESLAW MILOSZ

Every work of art is an act of faith.

DENISE LEVERTOV

IF WE COULD ASK HER, Denise Levertov would probably scoff at the idea that her poetry raises--let alone answers--any questions about reality and transcendence. Not that she minimized the importance of poetry. As she herself said, "poetry is necessary to a whole man," and elsewhere: poetry is a means to "a saner state in the midst of our being." ¹ Her claims for her own poetry notwithstanding, however, Levertov's poetry--like all great poetry--does raise such questions, and it does so precisely because of the relation Levertov assumes among the poet, language, and the world. The result of that complex union is poetry, a congeries that constitutes a certain kind of reality and intimates transcendence. By considering and reflecting on some of her prose and poetry under the headings of poet, language, and world, I would like to provide some grounds for an ongoing reassessment that will sustain a sense of Levertov's importance, forestalling the kind of decline or eclipse in reputation that is sometimes the sad fate of writers who, in W. H. Auden's words, have "become [their] admirers."

In a 1997 interview Levertov discussed her vocation and how poetry can be a kind of reality. ² Her comments recall a number of insights that critics of her work have made over the years and many of the things we can infer from her work. From her mother she derived her attention to things, ³ and from her father something of the Hasidic spirit that sees "the divine spark" in everything. From her reading of R. M. Rilke she got the sense of vocation; from G. M. Hopkins the idea of inscape and instress; from William Carlos Williams the often quoted, much interpreted aphorism, "No ideas except in things"; and from a variety of artists, writers, and critics the notion expressed so well in the phrase from Wordsworth that she quoted so often: "[L]anguage is not the dress but the incarnation of thoughts." ⁴ It is just this fundamentally reverent, receptive, and attentive disposition that makes her encounter with reality and the mystery at the heart of Being so productive of a sense of transcendence.

It is particularly important to discuss Levertov's contribution to the exploration of reality and transcendence at this time. And though Levertov had little interest in or patience for modern theory, a first approach to the subject requires that I make some observations about the (postmodern) problem. We live in a technological environment that promises to improve the human condition. But this environment can also quickly become hostile, lethal, toxic. We live amid the hopes and nightmares of genetic engineering, the fascination with computers, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality. We are haunted by the fantasies of speculative fiction and coerced and co-opted by the increasingly hectic pace of commercial and indeed all productive life. ⁵ And we are further urged on by the pace of automation, superfast computers, and the miniaturization of all things.

Behind these phenomena stand the various ways in which human beings are shaped by mediated forms of experience, or experience modified, transformed, and altered by dominating mind-sets or mind-sets of domination. We cannot, as Wallace Stegner observes, look at anything without wanting to use it, own it, reshape it to our needs, desires, or fantasies. ⁶ We cannot think of anything but must evolve a theory to explain it, or even a whole system of explanations that, in the end, tend to dominate and overpower the "anything," justifying whatever use we want to make of it. These are some of the bitter dregs of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment.

Levertov's poetry is important to discuss precisely...