A Poetics of Consenting Attention: Simone Weiľs Prayer and the Poetry of Denise Levertov

This article examines the practice of attention as a subject of Denise Levertov’s poetry, one that emerges fully only after her commitment to Christianity and its convictions of immanent, incarnate transcendence. Simone Weil fluidly and precisely describes this practice and the receptive consent to the subject that accompanies it in her response to stark contemporary circumstances earlier in the century. I explore Levertovs exemplification of this practice in Weiľs terms, arguing that Levertovs hesitant and late-arriving Catholicism, like Weiľs own devotional experience, underwrites the responsorial practice of attention. It operates for Levertov as both a poetic method and as a response to contemporary questions of poetics and language, producing a poetics that privileges the possibility of knowing as love and speaking as prayer.