Biography EssayIn her prolific, highly regarded, sometimes controversial career, Denise Levertov has created a multidimensional body of poetry that is pervaded by her strong belief in her poetic vocat...
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Denise Levertov is an important and established poet of the 1960s and 1970s whose poems are widely admired and anthologized, whose poetic theories are quoted by fellow practitioners, and whose teachin...
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In her prolific, highly regarded, sometimes controversial career, Denise Levertov has created a multidimensional body of poetry that is pervaded by her strong belief in her poetic vocation and by her ...
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Rexroth was an influential American poet, critic, editor, and translator, who was active in the San Francisco-based literary revival of the 1940s and 1950s. With the following review, originally publi...
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In the following essay, Surman traces the poets and principles that have influenced Levertov's work, focusing primarily on William Carlos Williams and the manner in which his ideas on perceptio...
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In this essay, Smith addresses Levertov's development as a political poet, tracing her evolution as a writer from one who creates largely mystical verse to an "engaged" author oft...
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In the following excerpt from Marten's book-length study of Levertov, he analyzes the poet's message of Christian spirituality in three collections: Candles in Babylon, Oblique Prayers, ...
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Wakoski is an American poet and educator whose verse collections include The George Washington Poems (1967), Virtuoso Literature for Two and Four Hands (1975), and The Collected Greed, Parts 1-13 (198...
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In the following essay, Wagner-Martin addresses the message of religious affirmation in Levertov's later poetry, focusing on the collection Life in the Forest.
At what point does the overtly po...
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Levine-Keating is a poet and educator who is coauthor, with Walter Levy, of Lies through Literature (1991). In this excerpt, she analyzes Levertov's depiction of "the double" in t...
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In this excerpt, Mazzocco offers a mixed review of O Taste and See, complaining about the obscurity of many poems in the volume while lauding others for their skilled construction and dramatic appeal....
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In the following essay, originally published in Poetry (Chicago), Levertov discusses the creation of "organic" poetry.
For me, back of the idea of organic form is the concept that there ...
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Mills is an American educator and critic whose books include Theodore Roethke (1963) and Richard Eberhart (1966). In this essay, originally published in Mills's Contemporary American Poetry in ...
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Linda Welshimer Wagner (later Linda Wagner-Martin) is an American critic, poet, and educator whose books include The Poems of William Carlos Williams (1964) and Hemingway and Faulkner: Inventors/Maste...
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In the following essay, originally delivered at a symposium in 1967, Levertov asserts that poets must be actively and politically engaged in the events of their time.
The poet is in labor. She has bee...
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Zweig was an American poet, translator, and critic whose books include the poetry collections Against Emptiness (1971) and The Dark Side of the Earth (1974). Here he offers an unfavorable assessment o...
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Carruth is an American poet, critic, and editor, whose books include the poetry collections Contra Mortem (1967) and The Bloomingdale Papers (1975), and the collected criticism volume Working Papers (...
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In this interview, originally published in New York Quarterly, Levertov explains her method of writing and also discusses various influences on her poetry, including teaching, religion, and politics.
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Critical Essay by John Simon
Denise Levertov was well on her way to becoming a pleasant, minor British neo-romantic poet when an American had to come along, marry and transport her to San Francisco, a...
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Critical Essay by George Bowering
Denise Levertov, who has lived in America since 1948, commands the field and the grove as far as the women poets are concerned, and is among the five best poets of th...
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Critical Essay by William H. Pritchard
Denise Levertov writes too many poems, too many journal jottings broken up into lines, a title plunked on top of them with the hope that some rhythm of compositi...
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Critical Essay by Hugh Seidman
As usual, Miss Levertov can demonstrate the clarity of image and illumination of experience that we have come to expect from her. Yet it is often hard not to feel that [...
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Critical Essay by Harry Marten
Artistic longevity is always risky. A poet who with the passing of years settles into a style becomes not a maker of poems but of artifacts. It is a pleasure to note, th...
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Critical Essay by Charles Altieri
When one puts pressure on postmodern poetics by asking questions about philosophical adequacy, one immediately confronts a powerful contradiction: considered as metap...
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Critical Essay by N. E. Condini
Collected Earlier Poems—a selection from Denise Levertov's earliest English book, The Double Image (1946), and her three following collections, Here and N...
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Critical Essay by Doris Earnshaw
Denise Levertov was fitted by birth and political destiny to voice the terrors and pleasures of the twentieth century. Granddaughter on her father's side of a R...
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Critical Essay by Publishers Weekly
Poetry and prose are different talents, originating from opposite spheres of the brain. Not many poets have the ambidexterity to do both well, but Denise Levertov r...
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Critical Essay by Ingrid Rimland
[In Light Up the Cave, Denise Levertov, a] noted poet with a fertile mind and unabashed emotions, treats her readers to a volume of prose about what it means to be, an...
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Critical Essay by James Finn Cotter
Denise Levertov is a poet whose public outspokenness has not harmed her reputation as a highly private poet. Candles in Babylon … displays the same technical...
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Critical Essay by Daniel Berrigan, S.j.
The hallmark of Denise Levertov's prose [as in Light Up the Cave] is something so simple and elusive as clear eyed common sense. In the nature of things,...
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Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov
