A descendant in verse of H. D. and William Carlos Williams, Levertov came under the influence of Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, poets of the Black Mountain school, yet steered her own course. She taught at Tufts and Stanford and published spare naturalist-populist verse in Here and Now (1957), Overland to the Islands (1958), and With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1959). In 1961, she became poetry editor of The Nation and issued probing, disturbing verse in The Jacob's Ladder (1961) and O Taste and See: New Poems (1964). She toured Southeast Asia to protest American involvement in Vietnam, the subject of a collection of pacifist writings, Out of the War Shadow (1967), and a soulful triad, The Sorrow Dance (1967), Relearning the Alphabet (1970), and To Stay Alive (1971). In addition to verse, she collaborated with Edward Dincock, Jr., on a translation, In Praise of Krishna: Songs from the Bengali (1967).
Like many of her contemporaries, Levertov took up feminist themes, which she addressed in Footprints (1972), The Freeing of the Dust (1975), Life in the Forest (1978), and Candles in Babylon (1982). While teaching at Tufts, Brandeis, and Stanford, she remained focused on her art in Oblique Prayers: New Poems with Fourteen Translations (1984), Breathing the Water (1987), A Door in the Hive (1989), Evening Train (1992), and Tesserae (1995), and two essay collections, The Poet in the World (1973) and Light Up the Cave (1981). By the time of her death from lymphoma in Seattle, Washington, on December 20, 1997, she had accumulated a wide readership.
