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Kenneth Rexroth called Denise Levertov (1923-1997) \"the most subtly skillful poet of her generation, the most profound, . . . and the most moving.\" Author of twenty-four volumes of poetry, four books of essays, and several translations, Levertov became a lauded and honored poet. Born in England, she published her first book of poems at age twenty-three, but it was not until she married and came to the United States in 1948 that she found her poetic voice, helped by the likes of William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley. Shortly before her death in 1997, the woman who claimed no country as home was nominated to be America's poet laureate._x000B__x000B_Levertov was the quintessential romantic. She wanted to live vividly, intensely, passionately, and on a grand scale. She wanted the persistence of Cezanne and the depth and generosity of Rilke. Once she acclimated herself to America, the dreamy lyric poetry of her early years gave way to the joy and wonder of ordinary life. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, her poems began to engage the issues of her times. Vehement and strident, her poetry of protest was both acclaimed and criticized. The end of both the Vietnam War and her marriage left her mentally fatigued and emotionally fragile, but gradually, over the span of a decade, she emerged with new energy. The crystalline and luminous poetry of her last years stands as final witness to a lifetime of searching for the mystery embedded in life itself. Through all the vagaries of life and art, her response was that of a \"primary wonder.\"_x000B__x000B_In this illuminating biography, Dana Greene examines Levertov's interviews, essays, and self-revelatory poetry to discern the conflict and torment she both endured and created in her attempts to deal with her own psyche, her relationships with family, friends, lovers, colleagues, and the times in which she lived. Denise Levertov: A Poet's Life is the first complete biography of Levertov, a woman who claimed she did not want a biography, insisting that it was her work that she hoped would endure. And yet she confessed that her poetry in its various forms--lyric, political, natural, and religious--derived from her life experience. Although a substantial body of criticism has established Levertov as a major poet of the later twentieth century, this volume represents the first attempt to set her poetry within the framework of her often tumultuous life.

A look back at Denise Levertov's work throughout the 1960s shows her struggling to formulate a sacramental realism--a vision of reality as both sacramenturn et res--in aesthetic, philosophical, and even religious terms. From this perspective, her eventual reception into the Catholic church around 1990 was the organic evolution of a process extending back at least to the writing of \"City Psalm\" in 1964. Schloesser examines Levertov's poems, which show ongoing internal debate about the need to find a middle-way aesthetic between symbolism and naturalism closely paralleled debates of literary Catholic Revivalists in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

A human condition both catholic and Catholic The Unbearable Lightness of Being: even for those who have not read Milan Kundera's dense metaphysical novel (or seen the movie based on it) the title is probably familiar. Think of the million million dried stems of decaying Dragonflies, the thousand thousand leathery cavities Of old toads, the mounds of cows 'teeth, the tufts Of torn fur, the contorted eyes, the broken feet, the rank Bloated odors, the fecund brown-haired mildews That are the residue of his process. Whitehead wrote about these two poles (the fleeting and the eternal) not merely as a human problem nor as the problem posed by evolution - but rather as the fundamental human negotiation integrating (ephemeral) process into (abiding) reality.

This essay documents Levertov's ambivalence about Ezra Pound as it appears in a variety of sources, both public and private. It explores the discovery of this ambivalence in Levertov's life and in her poetic development, particularly in relation to her ethnic identity and friendship with members of Pound's circle. It also discusses the biographer's problems in interpreting this documentary evidence in the light of such recognized psychological issues as empathy, idealization, and anger, issues particularly pertinent to the female biographer/subject relationship. The essay shows that, in writing about Levertov's ambivalence about Pound, the biographer undergoes a similar process of self-discovery, one that uncovers differences as well as points of imaginative congruity.

Goldstein examines the poems of Denise Levertov. Levertov has the reputation of being a didactic poet who wrote angrily and often about the \"leaden burden of human evil\" endured by people of good will in the modern era. Her poems denouncing the Vietnam War are justly famous and controversial. Levertov did not change her poetics to suit her critics, not for a while. By and large, she continued to believe that \"There is no reason why a poetry of political and social engagement can't be as good as any other poetry.\"

Critics have focused on references to food or meals of the 20th century's poetry and fiction of Margaret Atwood, Anita Brookner, Angela Carter, and Willa Cather, among others, to which has proclivity benefiting from the second wave of feminist criticism since the 1960s addressing gender distinctions in culture and literature. Deeming text in its creativity as significant as context, Blodgett discusses on how these women's novels, short stories, and poems use food, especially through the concretizing sensory depictions of images both literal and figurative. .

Much of Denise Levertov's most recent works were inspired by a Christian imagination that responds to the paradox of Incarnation. Works such as \"Oblique Prayers\" are discussed.

Denise Levertov's \"Sands of the Well\" demonstrates a new sensibility. \"Sands of the Well\" is discussed as a turning point in Levertov's career.

Denise Levertov's political activism during the Vietnam War brought a profound change to her poetry. Works such as \"Staying Alive\" and \"Candles in Babylon\" are discussed.