New and Selected Essays

by Denise Levertov

“Denise Levertov fulfills the eternal mission of the true Poet: to be a receptacle of Divine Grace and a 'spendor of that Grace to humanity.'” —World Literature Today

Denise Levertov's New & Selected Essays gathers three decades' worth of the poet's most important critical statements. Her subjects are various––poetics, the imagination, politics, spirituality, other writers––and her approach independent minded and richly complex. Here in a single volume are recent essays exploring new ground broken by Levertov in the past decade as well as the finest and most useful prose pieces from The Poet in the World (1973) and Light Up the Cave (1981). This is a book to read and reread. With their combination of sensitivity and practicality, the New & Selected Essays will prove enormously helpful to the writer and reader of poetry. As Kirkus Reviews remarked about her prose: "This is humanism in its true sense––her attitude as evidenced (not described) by her writing is such that the reader cannot help but experience life, at least temporarily, with more intensity, joy, and imagination."

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Writing, Nonfiction

327 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 1992

About the author

American poet Denise Levertov was born in Ilford, Essex, England. Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff, was Welsh. Her father, Paul Levertoff, from Germany migrated to England as a Russian Hassidic Jew, who, after converting to Christianity, became an Anglican parson. At the age of 12, she sent some of her poems to T. S. Eliot, who replied with a two-page letter of encouragement. In 1940, when she was 17, Levertov published her first poem.

During the Blitz, Levertov served in London as a civilian nurse. Her first book, The Double Image, was published six years later. In 1947 she married American writer Mitchell Goodman and moved with him to the United States in the following year. Although Levertov and Goodman would eventually divorce, they had a son, Nickolai, and lived mainly in New York City, summering in Maine. In 1955, she became a naturalized American citizen.

During the 1960s and 70s, Levertov became much more politically active in her life and work. As poetry editor for The Nation, she was able to support and publish the work of feminist and other leftist activist poets. The Vietnam War was an especially important focus of her poetry, which often tried to weave together the personal and political, as in her poem "The Sorrow Dance," which speaks of her sister's death. Also in response to the Vietnam War, Levertov joined the War Resister’s League.

Much of the latter part of Levertov’s life was spent in education. After moving to Massachusetts, Levertov taught at Brandeis University, MIT and Tufts University. On the West Coast, she had a part-time teaching stint at the University of Washington and for 11 years (1982-1993) held a full professorship at Stanford University. In 1984 she received a Litt. D. from Bates College. After retiring from teaching, she traveled for a year doing poetry readings in the U.S. and England.

In 1997, Denise Levertov died at the age of 74 from complications due to lymphoma. She was buried at Lake View Cemetery in Seattle, Washington.

Levertov wrote and published 20 books of poetry, criticism, translations. She also edited several anthologies. Among her many awards and honors, she received the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Frost Medal, the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Lannan Award, a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Reviews

[Terry Everett · Rating 5 out of 5]

All poets and would-be poets should read this book. It is the best book ever on the art of poetry.

[Christina “6 word reviewer” Lake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for would-be poets.


I’ve read these essays no fewer than seven times, and I still find them stunning, instructive, hopeful, and irreplaceable to my thinking as a literary scholar and a teacher.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Twentieth-century alienation is another phase of the reaction. What began as a realization of human potential, a growth of individuated consciousness (to use Jung's useful term) out of the unconscious collective, became first a glorification of willful, essentially, optimistic individualism of its capitalist context, and then, as that turned sour and revealed more and more of greed in its operations, led to the setting of a high esthetic and moral value upon alienation itself.

But alienation is of ethical value, is life-affirmative and conducive to creativity only when it is accompanied by a political consciousness that imagines and affirms (and works toward) an alternative to the society from which it turns away in disgust. Lacking this, the alienated person, if he or she is gifted, becomes especially a prey to the exploitation that characterizes capitalism and is its underlying principle. The manifestations -- in words, music, paint, or what have you -- of private anguish are exploited by a greedy public, a public greedy for emotion at second hand because starved of the experience of community. Concurrently, for the same reasons, a creative person -- whether a pop star or a Sylvia Plath, a John Berryman, or an Anne Sexton -- internalizes the exploitive, unwittingly becoming self-exploitive.

And if the public is greedy, the critics, at their worst, are positively ghoulish, or at the least, irresponsible. I feel, for instance, that it is irresponsible for a columnist, in a memorial eulogy, to have written of Anne Sexton, "The manner of her death is at once frightening and fascinating to those who responded to her poetry, sharing as they do many of the same fears and insecurities she articulated so well. Her death awakens those fears and insecurities, the way some of her poems did, it raises them up from where they hide, buried by ordinary, everyday things." It is irresponsible because it is a statement made without qualification or development in a context of praise, and without, therefore, helping readers to see (as I suppose the writer herself does now see) that to raise our fears and insecurities into consciousness in order to confront them, to deal with them, is good; but that if the pain is confused with art itself, then people at the receiving end of a poem describing a pain and insecurity they share are not really brought to confront and deal with their problems, but are instead led into a false acceptance of them as signs or precursors of art, marks of kinship with the admired artist, symptoms of what used to be called "the artistic temperament."

[David Harbilas · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books on poetic form and prosody ever published. Her theories on line breaks are some of the best ever conceived, as well as her notion of the "psychic connection" between experience and poetry.

[Leia Penina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Denise Levertov is everything I believe to be good and true and accurate about poetry.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Levertov's essays range from the critical (insightful readings of Williams, less insightful readings of Seton), to the personal craft essay, to the political. Always smart, these essays bring to life one of the interesting poetic minds of the 20th century.