Denise Levertov’s prolific writing reflects the expression of a true artist influenced by her surroundings. Born in 1923 in Ilford, Essex to Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff and Paul Philip Levertoff, she spent her early years exploring in frequent solitude. She was free to wander, exploring the countryside and its historic towns, visiting museums, reveling in gardens, and reading avidly (Greene). She was educated by her mother, a Welsh writer and painter, who introduced her to many of the great poets and novelists. Her father was a Russian Jew of Hasidic background who later converted to Christianity and became an Anglican parson and scholar of Jewish mysticism; he was the primary influence for the central theme of the celebration of mystery in Levertov’s poetry. The poet’s family was quite socially active during the Second World War; her parents worked on behalf of German and Austrian refugees, her father protested Italian fascism and Britain’s lack of support of Spain, and she and her sister sold the Daily Worker door to door to working class families (qtd in "Denise Levertov 1923-1997"). This humanitarian involvement and awareness deeply influenced Levertov’s later work.
Levertov knew she wanted to be a writer from a very young age. When she was 12, she sent some of her poems to T.S. Eliot, who replied with excellent advice and encouragement to continue writing (poets.org). At seventeen, her first poem was published. Her first book, The Double Image, was published in 1946 – establishing her as one of the “New Romantic” poets. A year after her first volume of poetry was published, she married American writer Mitchell Goodman. They moved to the United States in 1948.
During her first years in America, Levertov was eager to explore poetry in a new context. She discovered inspiration in Emerson, Thoreau, and Ezra Pound, and especially William Carlos Williams. She encountered Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and with them became associated with the Black Mountain School of poetry (Greene). During the 1950s, Levertov experienced and lived in Mexico, France and then New York City; she continued to write, and produced five volumes of poems during this time. Her book With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads, published in 1960, established Levertov as a true American poet. Critics praised her poetic voice as “in one sense, indebted to the simple, concrete language and imagery, and also the immediacy...of precise beauty” ( Qtd. poetryfoundation.org).
With the United States' instigation and immersion in the Vietnam War during the 1960s, Levertov's social consciousness began to more fully impact her poetry and social life (poetryfoundation.org). She, along with some other writers, founded the organization "Writers and Artists Protest against the War in Vietnam." She was involved in numerous anti-war demonstrations, and was temporarily jailed several times for civil disobedience.
Levertov's poetry began taking on more socio-polical themes in the years during and after the Vietnam War, often causing critics and commentators to view these poems with disfavor. However, although some critics said that these socio-political poems were more akin to prose works or even "preachy" or "sentimental," a few saw value in them as historical documents which recorded and preserved the the people events and conversations therein.This reflects the idea Carolyn Forche makes clear in her introduction to "Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness," saying that "...the poem might be our only evidence that an event has occurred: it exists for us as the sole trace of an occurrence (31)."
James F. Mersmann's book, of the Vietnam Vortex: A Study of Poets and Poetry against the War, contains both lengthy analysis and substantial praise of Levertov's social protest poems. Mersmann writes of Levertov's early poetry, saying "There are no excesses of ecstasy or despair, celebration or denigration, naivete or cynicism; there is instead an acute ability to find simple beauties in the heart of squalor and something to relish even in negative experiences"(qtd in "Denise Levertov 1923-1997"). He continues, praising Levertov's ability to "...[reach] to the heart of things, [finding] out what their centers are. If the reader can follow, he is welcomed along, but although the poetry is mindful of communication and expression, its primary concern is discovery"(qtd in "Denise Levertov 1923-1997"). Mersmann nevertheless contrasts Levertov's early work with her poetry of social protest, claiming that "'the chaos of the war disrupted the balance, the wholeness, and the fundamental concern for discovery apparent in her work - [with] the shadow of the Vietnam War [coming] to alter all this: vision becomes clouded, form is broken, balance is impossible, and the psyche is unable to throw off its illness and sorrow'"("Denise Levertov 1923-1997").
The versatility and genuine humanitarianism of Levertov's poetic voice can be seen through her 1978 book "Life in the Forest," in which she simultaneously explores the pain and sorrow of her own life, and searches the the lives and connections between others for spiritual significance. Levertov manages to convey a lucid and sincere picture of her own life through the poems of the book while consciously avoiding an overly autobiographical voice through the use of variation of the habitual lyric mode. The poet shows a brilliant awareness of the world from which her poems were derived, and into which they would be received - moving in a direction which strongly tends toward a more expansive voice. Levertov, in her introduction to the book, writes about how the poems represented her desire to go beyond what she called "the over-use autobiographical, the dominant first-person singular of so much American poetry - good and bad - of recent years" (vii).
In contrast to the overwhelming social tragedy of the Vietnam War which influenced most of her published work of the 1960s, Levertov uses the subject of her mother's life and death as a theme for many of the poems in "Life in the Forest." Part of this new direction can be explained by her discovery of fellow poet and companion spirit in Cesare Pavese, of whom she wrote:
Pavese's beautiful poems are about various persons other than himself; though he is a presence in them also,their focus is definitely not autobiographical and egocentric and in his accompanying essays he speaks of his concept of suggesting a narrative though the depiction of a scene, a landscape, rather than through directly recounting of events as such (Levertov, vii).
This praise of Pavese compliments Levertov's own ability and tendency to avoid directly recounting autobiographical events or immense philosophical subjects through the painting of scenes and images in her own unique but straightforward style. This ability to summon the mystical and the divine in through simple and beautiful language is one of the outstanding characteristics of "Life in the Forest."
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