Denise Levertov

Based on Wikipedia: Denise Levertov

The Girl Who Wrote to T.S. Eliot

At twelve years old, Denise Levertov did something audacious. She gathered up her poems and mailed them to T.S. Eliot—the most celebrated poet in the English-speaking world, the man who had written "The Waste Land," the austere arbiter of literary modernism. He wrote back. Two pages of encouragement.

This wasn't the naive confidence of a child who didn't know any better. Levertov knew exactly what she was doing. She had declared at five years old that she would be a writer. By twelve, she was already submitting her work to the highest court she could imagine.

Five years after that letter, at seventeen, she published her first poem. She would go on to publish twenty-four books, win the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, receive the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She would become one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century—though she wasn't born American at all.

A Household of Exiles

Levertov grew up in Ilford, a suburb of London, but she was raised in a household that belonged nowhere and everywhere at once.

Her father, Paul Levertoff, was a Russian Hasidic Jew who had taught at Leipzig University. During the First World War, he was held under house arrest in England as an "enemy alien"—a designation based purely on his ethnicity, not his loyalties. Eventually he converted to Christianity and became an Anglican priest. The church, assuming he would want to minister to a Jewish congregation, placed him in Ilford, within reach of the Jewish neighborhoods of East London.

Her mother, Beatrice, came from a small mining village in North Wales, a world of coal dust and chapel hymns utterly removed from her husband's mystical Russian Judaism.

Levertov later wrote that her father's "Hasidic ancestry, his being steeped in Jewish and Christian scholarship and mysticism, his fervour and eloquence as a preacher, were factors built into my cells." This was not metaphor for her. She believed her very being was constructed from these disparate inheritances.

She never attended formal school. Her education happened at home, an eclectic curriculum of ballet, art, piano, French, and the standard academic subjects. But perhaps more formative were the soapboxes.

The Soapbox Education

Picture this: a young girl in 1930s England watching her father climb onto a literal soapbox to denounce Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia—what we now call Ethiopia. Her elder sister Olga standing on another soapbox, protesting Britain's failure to support Republican Spain against Franco's fascists. Her mother going door to door collecting signatures for the League of Nations Union, the idealistic precursor to the United Nations.

This was her political education. Not abstract theory, but watching her family put their bodies and voices into public spaces.

Levertov herself would walk the working-class streets of Ilford Lane, selling copies of the Daily Worker, the Communist Party newspaper. Her sister Olga served as secretary of the Yellow Star Movement, a militant anti-fascist organization that took its name from the badges Nazis forced Jews to wear.

When you understand this childhood, her later poetry makes perfect sense. The political was never separate from the personal in her family. Dinner table conversation and street-corner activism blurred together.

The Strangeness of Not Belonging

Levertov wrote about feeling strange growing up. She was part Jewish, part German through her father's culture, part Welsh through her mother, part English by birth and upbringing. But she wasn't fully any of these things.

Many people with such fractured identities feel excluded. Levertov felt special.

"I knew before I was ten that I was an artist-person and I had a destiny," she wrote. The very displacement that might have made another child feel lost gave her a sense of being chosen for something extraordinary.

This is worth sitting with. The same conditions that create outsiders can also create artists. What matters is not the displacement itself, but how you interpret it. Levertov interpreted it as preparation.

From the Blitz to America

When the German bombs began falling on London in 1940, Levertov was seventeen. She served as a civilian nurse during the Blitz, tending to the wounded while fires raged across the city and buildings collapsed into rubble. Her first book, "The Double Image," wouldn't appear until 1946, six years after her first published poem—years filled with war, destruction, and the slow work of rebuilding.

Then everything changed.

In 1947, she met Mitchell Goodman, an American writer. They married, and in 1948 she crossed the Atlantic to begin a new life in the United States. They settled mainly in New York City, spending summers in Maine. In 1949, their son Nikolai was born. By 1955, she had become a naturalized American citizen.

The marriage would eventually end—they divorced in 1975, after nearly three decades together. But the move to America transformed her poetry even more than it transformed her life.

The Black Mountain Revelation

Levertov's first two books had been written in traditional forms, the kind of metered, rhymed verse that dominated British poetry. They were accomplished work, but they weren't yet distinctly hers.

In America, she discovered the Black Mountain poets.

The Black Mountain College was an experimental arts school in North Carolina that operated from 1933 to 1957. It became a gathering place for avant-garde artists, dancers, musicians, and writers. The poets associated with it—Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan—were developing a new approach to verse that rejected traditional meter in favor of something they called "projective verse" or "open form."

Their central idea was that the breath of the poet should determine the line breaks. Poetry should follow the natural rhythms of speech and thought, not the inherited patterns of English prosody. They were influenced by the American modernist William Carlos Williams, who had famously declared "no ideas but in things" and written spare, imagistic poems about wheelbarrows and plums.

Levertov was published in the Black Mountain Review during the 1950s, though she always denied being a formal member of the group. What she took from them was permission—permission to develop her own lyrical style, to follow the American idiom rather than British conventions, to let her poetry breathe in new ways.

Her first American book, "Here and Now," shows the beginnings of this transformation. But it was "With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads" that established her reputation. She had found her voice.

The Weight of Vietnam

The 1960s changed American poetry, and no serious American poet could remain untouched by the Vietnam War. For Levertov, the war became an obsession, a moral emergency that demanded response.

She was not content to merely write about it. She joined the War Resisters League, one of the oldest pacifist organizations in America. In 1968, she signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, promising to refuse to pay taxes that would fund the war—a form of civil disobedience that carried real legal consequences.

Most significantly, she became a founding member of RESIST, an anti-war collective that included some of the most prominent dissenting voices of the era: Noam Chomsky, the linguist and political critic; William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain who would later be indicted for conspiracy to encourage draft resistance; Dwight Macdonald, the essayist and cultural critic; and her own husband, Mitchell Goodman.

As poetry editor for The Nation, one of America's oldest and most respected left-wing magazines, she had a platform to amplify other voices of resistance. She used it to publish feminist poets and political activists who might otherwise have struggled to find an audience.

The Poetry of Suffering

Levertov's Vietnam poetry was not merely protest. She was trying to do something harder: to weave together the personal and the political, to show how distant violence corrupts intimate life.

Her poem "The Sorrow Dance" speaks of her sister Olga's death, but in the context of a world at war. The private grief cannot be separated from the public horror. In "Life at War," she uses vivid, disturbing imagery to force readers to confront what was actually happening in Vietnamese villages—not the sanitized language of military briefings, but the reality of burned flesh and shattered bodies.

Her 1971 collection "To Stay Alive" gathered anti-war letters, newscasts, diary entries, and conversations into a single book. It explored the tension between individual conscience and collective action, between personal voice and mass culture. She was arguing that lasting change comes through the imagination of individuals who then band together.

"The Freeing of the Dust" became her first successful Vietnam poetry collection. In it, she tried something remarkable: to imagine the experience of the North Vietnamese, the people American bombs were falling on. She attacked the American pilots who dropped those bombs, refusing to let them hide behind the abstraction of "following orders."

Throughout these years, her central theme was suffering—not as passive victimhood, but as evidence that violence had become normalized, woven into the everyday fabric of American life. She wanted readers to feel the horror that their tax dollars and their elected representatives had made possible.

The Long Academic Life

While all this political work continued, Levertov also built a life in academia. After moving to Massachusetts, she taught at an extraordinary roster of institutions: Brandeis University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Tufts University, and the University of Massachusetts Boston.

She lived part-time in Palo Alto and taught at Stanford University, eventually holding a full professorship there for eleven years, from 1982 to 1993. At Stanford, she taught in the prestigious Stegner Fellowship program, named after the novelist Wallace Stegner, which has launched the careers of countless American writers.

Teaching suited her. She could shape younger poets, share her hard-won discoveries about craft, and maintain a steady income while continuing her own work. In 1984, Bates College awarded her an honorary doctorate of letters—recognition that she had become not just a poet but an institution.

The Turn Toward God

Here is where Levertov's story takes an unexpected turn.

After years of writing political poetry, she came to a difficult conclusion: beauty and politics could not ultimately coexist in verse. The demands of activism—the urgency, the anger, the need to persuade—were incompatible with the subtler work of art. Poetry that tried to serve both masters ended up serving neither well.

This realization opened a door that had been there all along. Religion.

Remember: she had grown up in a household saturated with spiritual seeking. Her father was a Jewish mystic who became a Christian priest. Her exposure to the Black Mountain poets had included Charles Olson's explorations of mysticism. The Transcendentalism of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson—that distinctly American tradition of finding the divine in nature—had shaped her American education.

In 1984, she uncovered old notebooks that had belonged to her mother and father. Whatever she found in them resolved something that had been troubling her for years. That same year, she converted to Christianity.

In 1989, she left Massachusetts and moved to Seattle, settling near Seward Park on Lake Washington. From her home, she could see Mount Rainier, the volcanic peak that dominates the Pacific Northwest skyline. She would write about that mountain as a metaphor for God—massive, enduring, sometimes hidden by clouds but always there.

On November 18, 1990, she was received into the Catholic Church at St. Edward's Parish in Seattle.

The Spiritual Journey in Verse

Looking back at Levertov's religious poetry, you can trace a decades-long spiritual journey.

Her earlier poems are full of searching and emptiness. Something is always lacking. In "Work that Enfaiths," she writes about "ample doubt" and her lack of "burning surety." She oscillates between glimpses of glory and engulfing darkness. Faith and despair take turns, and she cannot find stable ground.

"A Tree Telling of Orpheus," from her collection "Relearning the Alphabet," uses the myth of Orpheus—the musician whose playing was so beautiful that trees would uproot themselves to follow him—as a metaphor for spiritual transformation. The tree that hears the music and begins to change is the soul awakening to faith. Growth happens not through effort but through receptivity to something beyond yourself.

In her later collections, "A Door in the Hive" and "Evening Train," the imagery shifts. Now she writes of cliffs, edges, and borders—liminal spaces where transformation becomes possible. She begins to explore the idea that nothingness and darkness might themselves be aspects of God, not just obstacles to faith. Death might contain its own peace.

In "St. Thomas Didymus"—a poem about the apostle Thomas, who doubted the resurrection until he could put his fingers in Christ's wounds—and in "Mass," you can feel the anxiety draining away. The endless questioning quiets. She has not found all the answers, but she has stopped demanding them.

"Evening Train" is her breakthrough. In the poem about Mount Rainier, she writes that even when clouds cover the mountain, it remains massive and present. So too with God. The clouds are not evidence of absence. They are simply clouds.

In "The Tide," the final section of "Evening Train," she writes about accepting faith while acknowledging that not knowing answers is tolerable. You don't have to resolve every paradox to believe. The paradoxes are part of what makes faith something other than mere certainty.

The Final Years

Even after her conversion, Levertov remained politically engaged. When the United States attacked Iraq in 1991—the first Gulf War—she joined protests in Seattle. The woman who had opposed Vietnam in her forties was still opposing American military adventures in her sixties.

She retired from Stanford and spent a year traveling, giving poetry readings across the United States and Britain. She was now a grand figure in American letters, welcomed everywhere.

In 1994, she was diagnosed with lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system. She also suffered pneumonia and acute laryngitis that damaged her voice. But she continued lecturing and participating in national conferences, many focused on the intersection of spirituality and poetry that had become her central concern.

In February 1997, Mitchell Goodman died—the man she had married fifty years earlier, with whom she had raised a son, from whom she had been divorced for over two decades but who remained part of her story.

In December 1997, at seventy-four years old, Denise Levertov died from complications of her lymphoma. She was buried at Lake View Cemetery in Seattle, within sight of the mountain she had written about as a figure for the God she had spent her life seeking.

The Collection She Left

In 1997, the same year she died, Levertov published "The Stream & the Sapphire," a collection of thirty-eight poems drawn from seven earlier volumes. In her foreword, she explained that she had assembled these poems to "trace my slow movement from agnosticism to Christian faith, a movement incorporating much doubt and questioning as well as affirmation."

That phrase—"incorporating much doubt"—captures something essential about her. She was never a poet of easy answers. Even her religious poetry maintains the tension, the questioning, the refusal to pretend certainty where none exists.

Her papers are held at Stanford University, where she taught for so many years. Two full biographies appeared shortly after the fifteenth anniversary of her death: Dana Greene's "Denise Levertov: A Poet's Life" in 2012, and Donna Krolik Hollenberg's more substantial "A Poet's Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov" in 2013.

Why She Still Matters

Levertov's poem "What Were They Like?" remains in British school curricula today, included in the poetry anthologies that students study for their GCSE examinations. It imagines a future researcher asking about the Vietnamese people—their customs, their songs, their lanterns—and receiving answers that describe a culture destroyed by war. It is a poem about erasure, about what is lost when violence is normalized.

But her influence extends far beyond any single poem.

She demonstrated that a poet could be politically engaged without becoming merely a propagandist, could explore spirituality without becoming preachy, could transform her style and concerns multiple times over a long career without losing her essential voice.

She also embodied a particular kind of American life: the immigrant who becomes more American than the native-born, who takes American freedoms seriously enough to criticize American crimes, who finds in the American landscape—the mountains, the lakes, the vast spaces—a setting for spiritual discovery that Europe could never have provided.

The twelve-year-old who wrote to T.S. Eliot became a poet who would have been his peer. The girl who sold Communist newspapers in working-class neighborhoods became a Catholic convert. The British child of a Russian-Jewish father became an American citizen who protested American wars.

She kept changing. She kept growing. That may be her most important lesson: the artistic life is not about finding your voice and then repeating it forever. It is about remaining open to transformation, even when transformation is painful, even when it requires abandoning positions you once held with passionate conviction.

The mountain is still there, even when the clouds cover it. And sometimes, after the clouds clear, you see that the mountain was never quite where you thought it was. It was always somewhere else, waiting for you to find it.