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 teachings have influenced many beginners. She is an extremely fine craftsman, and her greatest talent is surely her profound understanding of her medium, of language as a sign system that is not only private and public but also aural and visual. Levertov's sense of the word is rich and comprehensive; words are not simply referents or evocations, but rather, in her favorite paraphrase of Wordsworth, "Language is not the dress but the incarnation of thought." Poems are verbal constructions, and every possible effect upon the reader's intellect and senses must be wrung from the words of the poem, but poems are never merely manipulations of words. The poem must be the result of perception so intense that it becomes meditation and can only arise from a profound attention to the immediate business of living.
