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.

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.

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 perception and writing are reflected in Levertov's poetry.

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 1965, he analyzes Levertov's poetry as it relates to that of William Carlos Williams and discusses her use of "personal observation and knowledge."

When one puts pressure on postmodern poetics by asking questions about philosophical adequacy, one immediately confronts a powerful contradiction: considered as metaphysical or religious meditation, the poetry of the sixties seems to me highly sophisticated; it takes into account all the obvious secular objections to traditional religious thought and actually continues and extends the inquiries of philosophers as diverse as Heidegger, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein. This very success, however, makes it disappo...

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, and Breathing the Water.

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.

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 two poems, asserting that this second self is a positive representation of female creativity and nonconformity.

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.

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 (1982). In the following review of The Poet in the World, originally published in the Hudson Review in 1974, Carruth analyzes Levertov's poetry as it relates to the poetic theories she espouses in her essays. He praises Levertov's "personal and practical" vision of her work and endor...

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 Lev...

In the following essay, originally published in Poetry (Chicago), Levertov discusses the creation of "organic" poetry.

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 (1984). In the following review of Breathing the Water, Wakoski finds that much of Levertov's work reflects a "linking of body and soul through God" while it also recognizes the attraction and danger of the natural world.

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 the United States. In what has come to be called the New American Poetry, she is only one among the leaders and champions, but her poetry, like Robert Creeley's, is most accessible to the new or common reader, while at the same instance being in the post-Williams stream. In addition, her work is all centered on the religious stance. She ex...

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 published in Poetry in November, 1957, Rexroth became an early proponent of the work Levertov produced after coming to the United States, finding it superior to the poetry of most of her contemporaries.

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 of Relearning the Alphabet, criticizing the "literariness" of the collection and faulting several poems that seem "incomplete."

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, so esoteric a virtue has not been grandly rewarded. Common sense? mainline writers along with their multicorporate pushers, have stampeded toward the rainbow named Avarice; others have shown a sorrowful, even despairing obsession with the Confession That Bares All. Levertov is aware of the implications here, destructive as they are of political unde...

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.

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, then, that with the publication of Life in the Forest, her twelfth book of verse, Denise Levertov continues to write exquisitely crafted lyrics. In their reverence for language and life, they make the reader continually aware that the poet's task is, as Levertov has said elsewhere, "to clarify … not answers but the existen...

Collected Earlier Poems—a selection from Denise Levertov's earliest English book, The Double Image (1946), and her three following collections, Here and Now (1957), Overland to the Islands (1958), and With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1960)—has appropriately just come out … as a complement to Life in the Forest (1978), allowing us to trace Miss Levertov's poetic development from its nervous English beginnings to the sensitive American balance of discourse and reflection....

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 Russian Hasidic Jew and on her mother's of a Welsh mystic, she has published poetry since the 1940s that speaks of the great contemporary themes: Eros, solitude, community, war…. How consistently she has constructed her poems of hard, solid and mysterious qualities can be seen in [Collected Earlier Poems 1940–1960]. (pp. 10...

[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, and to live as, a craftsman of language. The writing is rich, polished and complex—with insights to ponder, feelings to share, assumptions to correct and meaning to distill. A critic might object to certain statements or conclusions—that Solzhenitsyn, for example, has a "martyr complex" or that Sylvia Plath and other ...

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 composition according to "the musical phrase" (Pound) will hold them together. But in the best poems from [Life in the Forest] …, and they are found in its first section titled "Homage to Cesare Pavese," she works with longer lines and a discursive structure, yet avoids the breathless heart-on-sleeve manner that for me marr...

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 ["Life in the Forest"] would have benefited greatly from editing and more self-restraint. In the first section, "Homage to Pavese," she is more conscious than elsewhere of subduing the "I," and several poems to the poet's dead mother are quite moving. In general, Miss Levertov is perhaps sharpe...

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, and add to her already complex Judaeo-Celtic heritage the insalubrious atmosphere of the Bay Area's beatnikism: Mishna and Mabinogion, if you will; but then on to Zen and mishmash? So now, in her The Jacob's Ladder, behold verse like, "I hear / the tide turning. Last / eager wave over- / taken and pulled back / by moon-...

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 expertise that marked her previous dozen books; there is little in the open form that she cannot manage: nostalgia, protest, satire or story. "The Great Wave" catches the excitement of swimming at the shore as a child, while "The Art of the Octopus" is a perfect description and allegory Levertov admits that one piece,...

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 ranks high among that elect. Her essays and memoirs [in "Light Up the Cave"] are not only marked by the intense personal integrity of her poems; they stand alone as works of art…. Her memoirs of Sexton, Rukeyser, Duncan and Herbert Read are free of nostalgia and are concrete and frank in the details of Levertov's close ...