SOURCE: "Sound of Direction," in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. VIII, No. 1, Winter, 1967, pp. 218-25.

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/Masters (1975). A prominent authority on Levertov, Wagner is the author of Denise Levertov (1967), one of the early book-length studies of the poet, and is the editor of Denise Levertov: In Her Own Province (1979) and Critical Essays on Denise Levertov (1990). The following review of O Taste and See comments on Levertov's effective use of sound devices in her poetry, and also considers the poet's use of sound and hearing as a subject in her work.

I suppose it is fair to assume that nearly every writer has "direction," goal, in his writing processes—and that the adherence to a goal forces the writer to study, to polish, his...