SOURCE: "Levertov: Poetry and the Spiritual," in Critical Essays on Denise Levertov, edited by Linda Wagner-Martin, G. K. Hall & Co., 1991, pp. 196-204.

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 political become a more enclosing, less compartmentalized angst? Levertov's essays on Kim Chi Ha, Solzhenitsyn, Neruda, and others, as well as her important 1960s and 1970s poem collections that were often described as "political," have prompted a great many of her readers to characterize her work in that way. Yet running concurrent with that perhaps more easily labeled theme has always been a pervasive spiritualism. [In Religion and Literature, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 1986)], Joyce Beck points to the '"natural supernaturalism' of her romantic poetics," her rearing as the child of a Church of England clergyman, and her...