The Poetry and Poetic Life of Denise Levertov

Don’t say, don’t say there is no waterto solace the dryness at our hearts.I have seen

the fountain springing out of the rock walland you drinking there . . .¹

We see it in a child drinking in language the way a thirsty amaryllis soaks up water. We feel it in the dusky warmth of our own interiority as we search for, remember, and rehearse the words we need to strike our notes. We hear it in our elders when they tell stories of days closer to the beginnings of names: even their cadences and peculiar rasps of accent contribute to the drama that speech unfolds. We encounter it vividly in our poets: the miracle of language, where even a long-degraded word might return to life, springing up under the touch of brilliant imagination. And words, as fragile, durable, and enduring as faith, cast a light into our dreary lives, our compressed limits.

In the poet Denise Levertov (1923–1997) we encounter not only the exquisite mastery of words and the dazzling art of individual poems and collections of poems, but also the capacity to write poetry that sprang from an engaged life. Hence, the appearance of three books some fifteen years after her death—her collected poems and two outstanding biographies—represents a marvelous confluence, an invitation to discover or recover her penetrating vision, her wise voice.

Widely recognized as one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century, Levertov continues to hold a special place in the hearts of spiritual writers, retreat directors, theologians, mystics, and those who trace the connections between poetry, mystical experience, and hermeneutics. At the same time, her life provides a dramatic tableau for contemporary questions regarding doubt and faith, spirituality and religion, discourse and politics, history and hope. To be sure, her story also contains its share of brokenness, darkness, and irrationality, yet it is a story of grace. In the lineaments of her life we discover her most profound poem.

Denise Levertov was born in Essex, England. Her mother was Welsh, descended from a locally famous mystic, Angell Jones of Mold, but she was orphaned at the age of twelve and raised thereafter in an austere Congregationalist milieu. Her father was born in White Russia. He was the grandson of the famous Rabbi Schneur Zalman, founder of the Chabad branch of Hasidic Judaism. Although he became a Christian and later an Anglican priest, Denise’s father always thought of himself as a Jew who had found the messiah. For her part, Denise believed from an early age she was destined to be an artist. Schooled at home she published her first poem at sixteen and her first volume of poetry at the age of twenty-three in 1946.² Shortly after that she immigrated to the United States with her husband, Mitchell Goodman.

In the United States Levertov began developing her voice as an American poet, owing a great deal to friendships with such mentors as William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. She did not publish her second book of poetry until 1957, but in the ten years thereafter she produced six new volumes and established herself as one of the leading poetic voices in her generation. During this same time, while raising her son and working to keep her struggling family afloat, Denise increasingly immersed herself in the political scene. The poems she published in the late 1960s and early 1970s reflect her intense investment in the protest against the Vietnam War, an involvement that strained her relationship with Duncan to the breaking...