Poet and critic Denise Levertov, an antiwar, antinuclear activist who was moved to public testimonial, unified life and beliefs with art. Her work was a response to a calling. In her words, she chose to live in an all-out state of alert, “open to the transcendent, the numinous.” Assertive in politics and language, she eludes categorization as feminist or seer. Perhaps she is best described as an emerging American eclectic; she accommodated contemporary idioms as the language best suited to her well-plotted, luminous verse.
Of Welsh and Russian-Hasidic descent, Levertov was the daughter of Beatrice Spooner-Jones and the Reverend Paul Philip Levertov, a Jew turned Anglican. A native of Ilford, Essex, England, born on October 24, 1923, she was educated at home, where European Jews gathered during pre-Holocaust tensions. Her interests—art, French, and ballet—tended toward the genteel until the 1930s, when her family voiced their protest of Mussolini’s fascism and supported Spanish independence, Eastern Europe’s refugees, and the League of Nations. After completing her education privately and publishing The Double Image (1946), she married American author Mitchell Goodman, bore a son, and settled in the United States, where she became a naturalized citizen in 1955.
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.
