This bio has been republished from Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. See below for full attribution.
Born: 24 October 1923, United Kingdom
Died: 20 December 1997
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
Though born in Essex, England, Denise Levertov remains an influential poet of the mid-twentieth century American group known as the Black Mountain School. Both of Levertov’s parents celebrated the spiritual and mystical figures of their heritages. Her father, a Jewish Russian émigré and Anglican minister, claimed as an ancestor “an eighteenth-century rabbi reputed to know the language of birds” and “a founding member of Habid Hasidism, a Jewish mystical movement that . . . celebrates the mystery of everyday events.” Her mother descended from “the Welsh tailor and mystic Angell Jones of Mold” (“Levertov” 975-76). This mystical heritage imbues much of Levertov’s poetry, which investigates the spiritual in everyday life and domestic objects.
Like other poets of the Black Mountain School, Levertov wrote about the relationship of poetic form and content, most notably in the essay “Some Notes on Organic Form.” On the poet’s resources for conjuring poetry from everyday life, Levertov asserts that a truly organic poetic form “is based on an intuition of an order, a form beyond forms” (qtd. in “Levertov” 977). Levertov distinguishes between free verse poetry, in which “each line or cadence” can be isolated from others, and “organic form,” in which the entirety of the poem shapes and is shaped by individual parts: “the peculiar rhythms of the parts are in some degree modified, if necessary, in order to discover the rhythm of the whole” (“Some Notes”). In response to such Black Mountain poets as Robert Creeley, who wrote that “form is never more than an extension of content” (qtd. in Olson), and Charles Olson, who added that “right form . . . is the only and exclusively possible extension of content under hand,” Levertov maintains that a mystical undercurrent informs the poet’s ability to “discover and reveal” the forms already available to the poet who looks at the world with a careful and perceptive eye (“Some Notes”). This attention to the “reality” of things reflects the influence of William Carlos Williams, whose dictum “no ideas but in things” appeared in Book I of his influential long poem Paterson. Williams and Levertov had a close friendship for the ten years before Williams died in 1963 (Greene 40).
Levertov wrote her best-known poetry in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, though her poetic career spanned from the 1940s through the 1990s. Characterized by her interest in “English Romantic poetry,” Levertov’s early poetry evinces her investment in the lyric tradition. Her most frequently anthologized poetry investigates themes of everyday life and objects as well as the spiritual (see especially the collection Here and Now, published in 1956), and her anti-war and social protest poetry of the 1960s and 1970s remains a significant contribution to post-World War II American poetry (“Levertov” 976).
Levertov contributed an introduction to Loy’s 1958 book of selected poems Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables. In the introduction, titled “Notes of Discovery,” Levertov admits to having known little of Loy’s poetry—she remarks only upon having read “Pig Cupid” (referring to Loy’s long poem Love Songs to Joannes) “carelessly . . . some time ago.” However, Levertov celebrates Loy’s “appetite for sounds—for words as sounds—which results in a scintillating precision” and “close reasoning”; her poetic “variety” and “[s]hort lines”; her “clear sight”; her “dare-all contempt for falsification; and, finally, her “technical and moral” achievement (“Notes,” 4-16). Levertov singles out a few of Loy’s poems as exceptionally “beautiful”: “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” “Italian Pictures,” “Apology of Genius,” and “Joyce’s Ulysses” (“Notes,” 15).
Read more (Wikipedia)
Read more (Jewish Women’s Archive)
Work cited
Hadlock, John. “Denise Levertov.” Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde. Edited by Suzanne W. Churchill, Linda A. Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum. University of Georgia, 2020. https://mina-loy.com/biography/denise-levertov/. Accessed 29 May 2023.