American Literature Web Resources: Denise Levertov
 

 
Denise Levertov's passion for literature started early in life.  Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff, home schooled Denise and brought the works of Willa Cather, Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy in to the home.  At the age of 5, Denise declared that she wanted to be a writer.  The poet's interest in Hasidic mysticism can be attributed to her father.  Raised a Hasidic Jew, her father Paul Levertoff converted to an Anglican priest by the time Denise was born.  Denise Levertov felt that her inherited propensities and the cultural environment of her family had everything to do with who she became.  She became a highly respected American poet.

1923 Born October 24 in Ilford, Essex, England
1928 Alleged to have decided to become a writer
1935 Sent poetry to T. S. Eliot; he responded with 2 pages of "excellent advise," and encouragement
1940 At age 17 her first poem was published in Poetry Quarterly
During World War II She served as a civilian nurse in London throughout the bombings
1946 Her first book The Double Image (she wrote between the ages of 17 and 21) was published and brought her recognition as one of the "New Romantics"
1947 Denise married Mitchell Goodman, an American writer (they later divorced)
1948 They moved to America and settled in New York City; introduced to Transcendentalism, the experimentalism of Ezra Pound, and especially the literature of William Carlos Williams
1949 Their son Nickolai was born
1956 She became a naturalized citizen of the U.S.
1956 Her first American book Here and Now was published
Throughout 1950s Some of her work was published in the Black Mountain Review
1959 With Eyes at the Back of our Heads published and established her as a great American poet
1961, 1963-1965 Denise was poetry editor of The Nation magazine
1959-1975 Vietnam War; Levertov lectured and wrote against the war; feminism and activism became prominent in her literature; joins the War Resisters League
1967 One of her most notable works The Sorrow Dance (which contained her feelings toward the death of her older sister Olga and the war) was published
1975-1978 She was poetry editor for Mother Jones magazine
1975 Published Freeing the Dust, a collection of poetry that won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
1982-1993 Denise taught full time at Stanford University and part-time at the University of Washington; she lived in Seattle for the last decade of her life
1993 Retired from Stanford, but did benefits and poetry readings for a year in the U. S. and Europe
1997 Died on December 20 of complications due to lymphoma at age 74

Selected bibliography

Poetry-

The Double Image (1946)
Here and Now (1956)
Overland to the Islands (1958)
With Eyes at the Back of our Heads (1959)
The Jacob's Ladder (1961)
O Taste and See: New Poems (1964)
The Sorrow Dance (1967)
Relearning the Alphabet (1970)
To Stay Alive (1971)
Footprints (1972)
The Freeing of the Dust (1975)
Life in the Forest (1978)
Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960 (1979)
Candles in Babylon (1982)
Poems 1960-1967 (1983)
Oblique Prayers: New Poems (1984) with 14 translations from Jean Joubert
Poems 1968-1972 (1987)
Breathing the Water (1987)
A Door in the Hive (1989)
Evening Train (1992)
The Sands of the Well (1996)
The Life Around Us: Selected Poems on Nature (1997)
The Stream and the Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes (1997)

Prose-

The Poet in the World (1973)
Light Up the Cave (1981)
New and Selected Essays (1992)
Tesserae: Memories and Suppositions (1995)
The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams (1998) edited by Christopher MacGowan

Interesting Facts

Denise Levertov won several awards including the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Frost Medal, the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Lannan Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant.

She described her own poetry as taking on an "organic form."

Considered a writer of the Beat generation, Levertov was interested in Eastern Mysticism and translated Hindu work.
 

Denise Levertov developed a unique form of lyrical poetry, a style closely related to traditional version of English free form.  Perhaps her greatest influence came after her move to America.  Levertov once said that without the inspiration of William Carlos Williams, "I could not have developed from a British Romantic with an almost Victorian background to an American poet of any vitality" (qtd. in Baym 2584).  With his influence, she employed free form to better express her relationship to nature and the political situations around her.  She believed that there should be a balance between the author and the subject in order to attempt to explain the inexplicable.  The result is straightforward poetry that is, as one critic called, literary "magical realism" (Baym 2585).

Sources

Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia Standard 2001 on CR ROM
Baym, Nina (General Editor).  The Norton Anthology of American Literature, fifth ed.  New York: W.W.
Norton and Company, 1998.
"Levertov, Denise," Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2000 http://encarta.msn.com (March 18,2001)
"Denise Levertov- The Academy of American Poets." http://www,poets.org (March 18, 2001)
"Denise Levertov's Life and Career." http://www.english.uiuc.edu (March 18, 2001)

Links

"The Genealogy of Postmodernism: Contemporary American Poetry"

Obituary: "Socially Committed" poet...dies at 74

"The Beat Page" w/ Levertov poetry