Denise Levertov: Poet and Pilgrim

William Butler Yeats posed the dilemma: one must choose the "perfection of the life or of the work." Denise Levertov offers a refutation of that choice. As "poet in the world" she responded with full engagement to her historical environment. Her poetry of protest was written in response to the major political issue of her time, the Vietnam War. She later confronted the tragedies of her personal life through her poetic craft, ultimately coming to a renewed sense of awe and wonder. In the last years of her life this avowed agnostic turned to faith, and in the process produced a luminous and crystalline poetry. Levertov acknowledges that writing poetry was her means to faith, that her work "enfaithed." It is also true that her faith resulted in renewed creativity and produced poetry "in service to the transcendent." For Levertov, there was no choice between life and work; the desire for engagement and the consequent transformation linked the two.

Denise Levertov claimed few designations other than that of poet and pilgrim. At age seven or eight she intuited she was an artist; she soon understood her vocation was to poetry. When she was twelve she sent off her first clutch of poems to T. S. Eliot for critique, who offered the burgeoning artist encouragement. Just four years later, her first volume of poetry was published. Her commitment to verse was life long; when she died in 1997 at age seventy-four she had produced more than twenty books of poetry and was acclaimed as one of the best poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Secure in her vocation, she was less sure of her grounding. She had "illustrious ancestors" from Russia and Wales, and understood the formative influence of the English countryside on her psyche, but she considered herself a pilgrim. She belonged to no terrain, except perhaps "the borderland," and had no home except language itself, which she referred to as her "Jerusalem."

Although Levertov rejected much of the influence of her early family life, she was nonetheless greatly shaped by it. Her Welsh mother was a painter, a lover of nature, and later herself a poet. Her father, a complex man, a Russian Jew descendent from an important Hasidic line, converted to Christianity and ultimately became an Anglican priest ministering to the refugee Jewish population that flooded England in the 1930s and '40s. He was a scholar who wrote on Jewish mysticism, all the while intensely engaged in bringing Jews to the Christian Messiah. He kept an almost life-size stone statue of Jesus preaching in his study. During World War I, Paul and Beatrice Levertoff endured suffering for their socialist leanings, even as they welcomed refugees and exiles of many stripes to their home outside of London. Denise, who never attended school, was taught by her mother at home until she was about twelve. Then she was free to learn as she liked, exploring the ruins of the Essex countryside, wandering in the museums of London, reading widely and voraciously in English literature, studying ballet and painting. Since her only sibling was a sister nine years her senior, she was mostly alone.

Early on she was fascinated by the letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, who became her first literary mentor. From him she absorbed a sense of being a pilgrim, the value of inner experience, and the importance of solitude as the basis for poetic expression. Although she would have other mentors, Rilke was seminal; even in her seventies Levertov wrote poetic variations on his work. From Rilke she learned that "if a thing is to speak to you, you must for a certain time regard it as the only thing that exists, the unique phenomenon that your diligent and exclusive love has placed at the center of the universe, something the angels serve that very day upon that matchless spot."¹ Rilke taught her a way of proceeding as poet, a form of paying attention that confirmed what she had learned as a very young child from her mother in the garden of their family home. In a posthumously...