(1923-1997)
Denise Levertov was born and brought up in Ilford, England and was educated mostly at home by her father, a Russian Jewish immigrant, who became an Anglican priest, her Welsh mother, BBC programmes and private tutors during a bucolic childhood in Ilford, Essex.
She decided to become a poet, but she didn't want to go to graduate school.
She decided to become a poet, but she didn't want to go to graduate school.
Instead, she got her nurse's training and spent
three years as a civilian nurse during the Blitz in London. She liked the work
itself, but she didn't like the structure — she was just 19 years old, and she
had been homeschooled her whole life.
She said: "I didn't like the strain
of taking even the one and only examination that I ever took in my life, and I
didn't like the way in which one's personal life was regulated. I was always
crawling in and out of windows to avoid curfews!"
She wrote poems each
night after her shift at the hospital, and published her first book, The
Double Image (1946).
She met and married an American poet, Mitchell
Goodman, and in 1948, they moved to the United States, where she became a nauralised citizen in 1955. She had one son and was later divorced. She taught at a number of universities, including Tufts and
Stanford, served as poetry editor of the liberal journal The Nation, and
published more than 20 books of poetry,
including With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1959), The Freeing of
the Dust (1975), Breathing in the Water (1984), and The Life
Around Us (1997), as well as collections of essays and reviews.
Levertov became one of the most American of
poets, notable for her political and environmental activism. She was against the Vietnam War and
later against nuclear proliferation and American intervention in El
Salvador.
Cover of Poems, 1960-1967 |
Although she did
not define herself as a nature poet or a feminist, Denise Levertov frequently wrote poetry celebrating the values of nature and
nurture from a distinctly feminine perspective.
"Come into Animal Presence" (collected in Poems, 1960-1967) takes up a recurring theme in Levertov's work: the world is infused with a holy radiance, if only we have eyes to see it."
"Come into Animal Presence" (collected in Poems, 1960-1967) takes up a recurring theme in Levertov's work: the world is infused with a holy radiance, if only we have eyes to see it."
Come into animal
presence.
No man is so guileless as
the serpent. The lonely white rabbit
on the roof is a star
twitching its ears at the rain.
The llama intricately
folding its hind legs to be seated
not disdains but mildly
disregards human approval.
What joy when the insouciant
armadillo glances at us and doesn't
quicken his trotting
across the track into the palm bush.
No man is so guileless as
the serpent. The lonely white rabbit
on the roof is a star
twitching its ears at the rain.
The llama intricately
folding its hind legs to be seated
not disdains but mildly
disregards human approval.
What joy when the insouciant
armadillo glances at us and doesn't
quicken his trotting
across the track into the palm bush.
What is this joy?
That no animal
falters, but knows what it must do?
That the snake has no blemish,
that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings
in white star-silence? The llama
rests in dignity, the armadillo
has some intention to pursue in the palm forest.
Those who were sacred have remained so,
holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence
of bronze, only the sight that saw it
faltered and turned from it.
An old joy returns in holy presence.
falters, but knows what it must do?
That the snake has no blemish,
that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings
in white star-silence? The llama
rests in dignity, the armadillo
has some intention to pursue in the palm forest.
Those who were sacred have remained so,
holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence
of bronze, only the sight that saw it
faltered and turned from it.
An old joy returns in holy presence.
One of the poets she admired most was William
Carlos Williams. In 1951, Levertov send Williams a fan letter; she was in her
late 20s, and he was 68, recovering from his first stroke. After exchanging letters
for a while, she took a bus up to his hometown of Rutherford, New Jersey, to
see him.
Williams was a warm and receptive host, and after that, she would go
to visit him a couple of times a year. She would arrive in time for lunch with
Williams and his wife, Flossie, then spend a few hours reading him her poetry,
sometimes reading his poetry aloud, and chatting about people they both knew.
Williams became Levertov's mentor, and they exchanged letters until his death
in 1962.
This site Part One : has photographs and the letters of Levertov and Williams.
Part Two is here.
The Letters of Denise Levertov and Williams
This site Part One : has photographs and the letters of Levertov and Williams.
Part Two is here.
Levertov was
acclaimed by Kenneth Rexroth in The New York Times as " the most subtly
skilful poet of her generation, the most profound, the most modest, the
most moving."
She said: "Strength of feeling, reverence
for mystery, and clarity of intellect must be kept in balance with one another.
Neither the passive nor the active must dominate, they must work in
conjunction, as in a marriage."
She said "I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a
poem is close to prayer.
So to celebrate and give thanks for her life and the gifts she gave us in her poetry here are a few more of her wonderful poems.
The video is an extract from an hour-long reading she gave for the Lannan Foundation in Los Angeles on 7 December 1993. The poems are: 'Settling', 'Open Secret', 'Tragic Error', 'The Danger Moment', 'A Gift' and 'For Those Whom the Gods Love Less', three of which were also included in her Selected Poems (New Directions, 2002), which was published in Britain as New Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2003): http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852246537
These are all gems to delight..
THE BEAUTY WE LOVE
We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension--though affected,
certainly, by our actions.
A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal--
then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we've been, when we're caught up again
into our own sphere
(where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
–but we have changed, a little.
“Sojourns in the Parallel World” by Denise Levertov from Sands of the Well. © New Directions Books, 1994.
Pablo Picasso Two Girls Reading. Source
THE SECRET
Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.
I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me
(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even
what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,
the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,
and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that
a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines
in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for
assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.
Image source
Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.
I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me
(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even
what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,
the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,
and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that
a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines
in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for
assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.
Image source
RETURNING
You can live for years next door
to a big pine tree, honored to have
so venerable a neighbor, even
when it sheds needles all over your flowers
or wakes you, dropping big cones
onto your deck at still of night.
Only when, before dawn one year
at the vernal equinox, the wind
rises and rises, raising images
of cockleshell boats tossed among huge
advancing walls of waves,
do you become aware that always,
under respect, under your faith
in the pine tree’s beauty, there lies
the fear it will crash someday
down on your house, on you in your bed,
on the fragility of the safe
dailiness you have almost
A CURE OF SOULS
The pastor
of grief and dreams
guides his flock towards
the next field
with all his care.
He has heard
the bell tolling
but the sheep
are hungry and need
the grass, today and
every day. Beautiful
his patience, his long
shadow, the rippling
sound of the flock moving
along the valley.
The pastor
of grief and dreams
guides his flock towards
the next field
with all his care.
He has heard
the bell tolling
but the sheep
are hungry and need
the grass, today and
every day. Beautiful
his patience, his long
shadow, the rippling
sound of the flock moving
along the valley.
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