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Denise Levertov (1923-1997)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=42

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Denise Levertov including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/levertov/levertov.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on Denise Levertov.

BIOGRAPHY

Born in Ilford, Essex, England, Denise Levertov benefited from her family's rich cultural heritage. A descendant of Shneour Zalman, a Russian founder of the Habad branch of Hasidism, Levertov's father Paul Levertoff converted from Judaism to become an Anglican priest. The poet's mother Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff claimed an ancestry that included the mystical teacher Angell Jones of Mold, whose son sponsored a Welch intellectual salon in the 1870s. Educated largely at home, Levertov combined a love of literature with an eclectic spirituality. Like her mother, who undertook humanitarian causes for the League of Nations Union, Denise Levertov was an activist in the cause of peace during the antiwar movements from Vietnam onwards. During the Second World War, Levertov served the cause of healing as a nurse in London. In 1946 she published a first volume of verse and then immigrated to America two years later. Through her husband, Mitchell Goodman, she met poets in the Black Mountain School including Robert Creeley and Cid Corman who published her verse in the avant-garde journal Origin. Her new style parted company with the formalist measures of her early poetry in favor of the free verse forms of William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan. In 1955 Levertov became American citizen and during the subsequent decades in her several roles as poet, critic, and teacher, she had an important influence on a younger generation of American experimental poets. In addition to publishing fifteen volumes of verse, including her representative collection Selected Poems (1986), she has authored two important volumes of prose criticism The Poet in The World (1973) and Light Up the Cave (1981). After teaching variously in the Boston area at Brandeis, MIT, and Tufts University, she moved to Seattle in 1989 where she combined lecturing at the University of Washington with her appointment as full professor at Stanford University from 1982-1993. Until her death in 1997, she pursued an active schedule of public readings and carried on a dynamic correspondence with a network of other writers. A deeply sacramental author, Levertov believed as she wrote in "Poetry, Prophecy, Survival" that her special vocation as poet was "to live with the door of one's life open to the transcendent, the numinous."

SECONDARY SOURCES

Gelpi, Albert, Ed. Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.

Levertov, Denise. Conversations with Denise Levertov. Ed. Jewel Spears Brooker. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.

Little, Anne C. and Susie Paul, Eds. Denise Levertov: New Perspectives. Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 2000.

Marten, Harry. Understanding Denise Levertov. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1988.

Rodgers, Audrey T. Denise Levertov: The Poetry of Engagement. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993.

Wagner-Martin, Linda, Ed. Critical Essays on Denise Levertov. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991.

—. Denise Levertov. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1967.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER