SOURCE: "Songs of Experience: Denise Levertov's Political Poetry," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 27, No. 2, Summer, 1986, pp. 213-32.

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 often concerned with war and revolution.

Denise Levertov's large body of political poetry records the vicissitudes of a deeply ethical imagination grappling with the difficult public issues of the last twenty years. At forty-four, Levertov had published six volumes before her first Vietnam protest poems appeared in The Sorrow Dance (1967). The seven volumes since The Sorrow Dance all contain poems in response to contemporary political issues; in prose and at readings she is an outspoken activist. Though she continues to write many nonpolitical poems and to gather politically topical poems in separate sections within volumes, Levertov's work since the late sixties is infused with...