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To Stay Alive
A collection of poetry exploring political themes expresses the author's philosophy of social protest
- GenresPoetry
86 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
43 people want to read
About the author
Denise Levertov
198 books170 followersAmerican 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 27, 2022
TO STAY ALIVE is a political odyssey emboldened by Levertov's personal involvement in the anti-war movement of the 1960s, and her willingness to share personal details. Indeed, TO STAY ALIVE brings Levertov closer to "confessional poetry" than in any other book of her's that I have read. Levertov, however, describes herself as being "antagonistic on the whole to what is called confessional poetry which seems to exploit the private life". Her opinion is that confessional poetry belongs to the school of poetry that rewards mental illness. Levertov never refers to any specific poet, but one is reminded of Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath, both of whom have come to represent archetypes of "the poet".
TO STAY ALIVE begins with the "Olga Poems", about the poet's sister, Olga Levertoff - the date of their composition is provided (May-August, 1964) along with the date of Olga Levertoff's birth and death (1914-1964). The poet's portrait of her sister presents a tortured woman who suffered greatly in her lifetime. The poet also attaches a quantity of nostalgia for the childhood they shared, along with personal suffering at the loss of her sister...
Black one, black one,
there was a white
candle in your heart.
- The Olga Poems, ii
I looked up from my Littlest Bear's cane armchair
and knew the words came from a book
and felt them alien to me
- The Olga Poems, iii, i
On your hospital bed you lay
in love, the hatreds
that had followed you, a
comet's tail, burned out
as your disasters bred of love
burned out,
while pain and drugs
quarreled like sisters in you
- The Olga Poems, iv
Through the years of humiliation,
of paranoia and blackmail and near-starvation, losing
the love of those you loved, one after another,
parents, lovers, children, idolized friends, what kept
compassion's candle alight in you, that lit you
clear into another chapter (but the same book) 'a clearing
in the selva oscura,
a house whose door
swing open, a hand beckons
in welcome'?
- The Olga Poems, vi
The "Olga Poems", though previously published in another form, is here reprinted for good reason. Levertov ties the "Olga Poems" together with the later poems. Indeed, there is a continuity, as Levertov explains in the preface...
"It assimilates separated parts of a whole. And I'm given courage to do so by the hope that whole will be seen as having some value not as mere confessional autobiography but as a document of some historical value, a record of one person's inner and outer experience in America during the sixties and the beginnings of the seventies, an experience which is shared by so many and which transcends the peculiar details of each life, though it can only be expressed through those details"
The "Olga Poems" are followed by a number of poems that follow the continuity of political themes and personal involvement in the political activity of the 1960s (including the act of writing politically charged poetry)...
On the Times Square sidewalk
we shuffle along, cardboard signs
- Stop the War -
slung round our necks.
- A Note to Olga (1966), ii
who do these acts, who convince ourselves
it is necessary; these acts are done
to our own flesh; burned human flesh
is smelling in Vietnam as I write.
- Life as War
infant after infant, their names forgotten,
their sex unknown in the ashes,
set alight, flaming but not vanishing,
not vanishing as his vision but lingering,
- Advent 1966
Heavy, heavy, heavy, hand and heart.
We are at war,
bitterly, bitterly at war.
...
And at their ears the sound
of the war. They are
not listening, not listening.
- Tenebrae
After the "Olga Poems" and the other shorter poems begins Levertov's epic poem, "Staying Alive". "Staying Alive" is the longest poem I've read by Levertov, and the most impressive. Indeed, I don't use the label "epic poem" lightly. The poem is a political epic of 1960s political activism and resistance.
"Staying Alive" is divided into a Prologue and Four Parts.
In the Prologue, Levertov presents a paradox that establishes her perspective of war, a paradox that, like Heller's Catch-22, enforces the madness and hypocrisy of war...
'"It became necessary
to destroy the town to save it,"
a United States major said today.
He was talking about the decision
by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town
regardless of civilian casualties,
to rout the Vietcong.'
- Prologue: An Interim, ii
This paradox is enforced by the re-telling of an interaction between two children in a laundromat. 'When I say, / Do you want some gum? say yes.' / 'Yes . . .' 'Wait! - Now: / Do you want some gum?' / 'Yes!' 'Well yes means no, / so you can't have any.' (Prologue) There is a clear comparison. How better to emphasize the childishness of war, the juvenile and asinine "logic" behind war?
The poet's concludes (mirroring the final stanza of STAYING ALIVE)...
O language, mother of thought,
are you rejecting us as we reject you?
Language, coral island
accrued from human comprehensions,
human dreams,
you are eroded as war erodes us.
- Prologue: An Interim, ii
The poems are filled with allusions to friends and writers, incorporating their words in a way that creates a collage effect. Levertov uses the words and voices of others effectively widening the scope of her perspective on the war. It is one thing for a lone poet to write protest poems. Here, Levertov elaborates upon the protest poem, elaborates upon the confessional poem, thereby elevating her poem into the epic...
Or Rilke said it, 'My heart...
Could I say of it, it overflows
with bitterness... but no, as though
its contents were simply balled into
formless lumps, thus
do I carry it about.'
- Life at War
'We must not be angry, we must
L-O-O-O-V-E!' Judy Collins
bleats loud and long into the P.A. system,
but hardly anyone claps, and no one
shouts Right On.
The silence cheers me.
Judy, understand:
there comes a time when only anger
is love
- Part II, ix. 'I Thirst'
'in merry London, my most kindly nurse,
that to me gave this life's first native source'
- Part III, vi
Tony writes from Ohio:
'An atomistic bleakness drags on students this fall
after the fiery fusion of last spring.'
- Part IV, i. Report
Camus wrote:
'I discovered inside myself, even in the very midst of
winter, an invincible summer.'
- Part IV, ii. Happiness
She even quotes herself, referring back to early passages from the cycle. Even when the poet refers directly to the act of writing, the reader cannot shake the uncanny feeling that accompanies the reading of passages that occur and re-occur, giving the cycle a haunted quality...
'We must not be angry, we must
L-O-O-O-V-E!' Judy Collins
bleats loud and long into the P.A. system,
but hardly anyone claps, and no one
shouts Right On.
The silence cheers me.
Judy, understand:
there comes a time when only anger
is love
- Part II, ix. 'I Thirst'
'There comes
a time
when only anger
is love' -
I wrote it, but know such love
only in flashes.
- Part IV, v. Report
Indeed, STAYING ALIVE is haunted by Levertov's sister Olga, by friends who died, by the thousands dead in Vietnam...
and still I've not begun the poem,
the one she asked for ('If you would write me a poem
I could live for ever' - postmarked
the night she died, October twenty-ninth.)
- Part IV, iii. Two from the Fall Death-News
Olga, who was such a big part of the "Olga Poems" (obviously), doesn't appear in "Staying Alive" until the Third Part. Perhaps this is to play down Olga as the link between the "Olga Poems" and "Staying Alive". Indeed, there is more prominence in the personal and political currents that run through both cycles of poems...
Now I can barely remember what it is
to want oblivion. 'The dreamy lamps
of stonyhearted Oxford Street' -
de Quincy wandered
in hopeless search beneath them,
Olga rushed back and forth
for years beneath them, working
in her way for Revolution
and I too in my youth
knew them and was lonely, an ignorant girl.
- Part III, vi
Those are the same lamps
of my dream of Olga - the eel or cockle stand,
she in the flare caught, a moment, her face
painted, clownishly, whorishly. Suffering.
- Part IV, i. Report
The Third Part ends with a transcendental message. This is perhaps my favourite part of the STAYING ALIVE...
Bet said:
There was a dream I dreamed always
over and over,
a tunnel
and I in it, distraught
and great dogs blocking
each end of it
and I thought I must
always go on
dreaming that dream,
trapped there,
but Mrs. Simon listened
and said
why don't you sit down
in the middle of the tunnel
quietly:
imagine yourself
quiet and intent sitting there,
not running from blocked
exit to blocked exit.
Make a place for yourself
in the darkness
and wait there. Be there.
The dogs
will not go away.
They must be transformed.
Dream it that way.
Imagine.
Your being, a fiery stillness,
is needed to TRANSFORM
the dogs.
And Bet said to me:
Get down into your well,
it's your well
go deep into it
into your own depth as into a poem.
- Part III, ix
From the beginning of the First Part, Levertov asks: "Revolution or death." Rather she doesn't ask, she simple states: "Revolution or death." It is not a question but a statement, a fact that one must accept one or the other. This statement repeats throughout the cycle. She affirms her position in the beginning. She affirms her position in the end...
Revolution or death. Revolution or death.
Wheels would sing it
but railroads are obsolete,
we are among the clouds, gliding, the roar
a toneless constant.
Which side are you on?
Revolution, of course. Death is Mayor Daley.
- Part I, i
Yes, I want
revolution, not death: but I don't
care about survival, I refuse
to be provident, to learn automechanics,
karate,
soybean cookery,
or how to shoot.
- Part IV, iv. Daily Life
The poem ends with my favourite stanza...
O holy innocents! I have
no virtue but to praise
you who believe
life is possible...
- Part IV, v. Report
TO STAY ALIVE begins with the "Olga Poems", about the poet's sister, Olga Levertoff - the date of their composition is provided (May-August, 1964) along with the date of Olga Levertoff's birth and death (1914-1964). The poet's portrait of her sister presents a tortured woman who suffered greatly in her lifetime. The poet also attaches a quantity of nostalgia for the childhood they shared, along with personal suffering at the loss of her sister...
Black one, black one,
there was a white
candle in your heart.
- The Olga Poems, ii
I looked up from my Littlest Bear's cane armchair
and knew the words came from a book
and felt them alien to me
- The Olga Poems, iii, i
On your hospital bed you lay
in love, the hatreds
that had followed you, a
comet's tail, burned out
as your disasters bred of love
burned out,
while pain and drugs
quarreled like sisters in you
- The Olga Poems, iv
Through the years of humiliation,
of paranoia and blackmail and near-starvation, losing
the love of those you loved, one after another,
parents, lovers, children, idolized friends, what kept
compassion's candle alight in you, that lit you
clear into another chapter (but the same book) 'a clearing
in the selva oscura,
a house whose door
swing open, a hand beckons
in welcome'?
- The Olga Poems, vi
The "Olga Poems", though previously published in another form, is here reprinted for good reason. Levertov ties the "Olga Poems" together with the later poems. Indeed, there is a continuity, as Levertov explains in the preface...
"It assimilates separated parts of a whole. And I'm given courage to do so by the hope that whole will be seen as having some value not as mere confessional autobiography but as a document of some historical value, a record of one person's inner and outer experience in America during the sixties and the beginnings of the seventies, an experience which is shared by so many and which transcends the peculiar details of each life, though it can only be expressed through those details"
The "Olga Poems" are followed by a number of poems that follow the continuity of political themes and personal involvement in the political activity of the 1960s (including the act of writing politically charged poetry)...
On the Times Square sidewalk
we shuffle along, cardboard signs
- Stop the War -
slung round our necks.
- A Note to Olga (1966), ii
who do these acts, who convince ourselves
it is necessary; these acts are done
to our own flesh; burned human flesh
is smelling in Vietnam as I write.
- Life as War
infant after infant, their names forgotten,
their sex unknown in the ashes,
set alight, flaming but not vanishing,
not vanishing as his vision but lingering,
- Advent 1966
Heavy, heavy, heavy, hand and heart.
We are at war,
bitterly, bitterly at war.
...
And at their ears the sound
of the war. They are
not listening, not listening.
- Tenebrae
After the "Olga Poems" and the other shorter poems begins Levertov's epic poem, "Staying Alive". "Staying Alive" is the longest poem I've read by Levertov, and the most impressive. Indeed, I don't use the label "epic poem" lightly. The poem is a political epic of 1960s political activism and resistance.
"Staying Alive" is divided into a Prologue and Four Parts.
In the Prologue, Levertov presents a paradox that establishes her perspective of war, a paradox that, like Heller's Catch-22, enforces the madness and hypocrisy of war...
'"It became necessary
to destroy the town to save it,"
a United States major said today.
He was talking about the decision
by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town
regardless of civilian casualties,
to rout the Vietcong.'
- Prologue: An Interim, ii
This paradox is enforced by the re-telling of an interaction between two children in a laundromat. 'When I say, / Do you want some gum? say yes.' / 'Yes . . .' 'Wait! - Now: / Do you want some gum?' / 'Yes!' 'Well yes means no, / so you can't have any.' (Prologue) There is a clear comparison. How better to emphasize the childishness of war, the juvenile and asinine "logic" behind war?
The poet's concludes (mirroring the final stanza of STAYING ALIVE)...
O language, mother of thought,
are you rejecting us as we reject you?
Language, coral island
accrued from human comprehensions,
human dreams,
you are eroded as war erodes us.
- Prologue: An Interim, ii
The poems are filled with allusions to friends and writers, incorporating their words in a way that creates a collage effect. Levertov uses the words and voices of others effectively widening the scope of her perspective on the war. It is one thing for a lone poet to write protest poems. Here, Levertov elaborates upon the protest poem, elaborates upon the confessional poem, thereby elevating her poem into the epic...
Or Rilke said it, 'My heart...
Could I say of it, it overflows
with bitterness... but no, as though
its contents were simply balled into
formless lumps, thus
do I carry it about.'
- Life at War
'We must not be angry, we must
L-O-O-O-V-E!' Judy Collins
bleats loud and long into the P.A. system,
but hardly anyone claps, and no one
shouts Right On.
The silence cheers me.
Judy, understand:
there comes a time when only anger
is love
- Part II, ix. 'I Thirst'
'in merry London, my most kindly nurse,
that to me gave this life's first native source'
- Part III, vi
Tony writes from Ohio:
'An atomistic bleakness drags on students this fall
after the fiery fusion of last spring.'
- Part IV, i. Report
Camus wrote:
'I discovered inside myself, even in the very midst of
winter, an invincible summer.'
- Part IV, ii. Happiness
She even quotes herself, referring back to early passages from the cycle. Even when the poet refers directly to the act of writing, the reader cannot shake the uncanny feeling that accompanies the reading of passages that occur and re-occur, giving the cycle a haunted quality...
'We must not be angry, we must
L-O-O-O-V-E!' Judy Collins
bleats loud and long into the P.A. system,
but hardly anyone claps, and no one
shouts Right On.
The silence cheers me.
Judy, understand:
there comes a time when only anger
is love
- Part II, ix. 'I Thirst'
'There comes
a time
when only anger
is love' -
I wrote it, but know such love
only in flashes.
- Part IV, v. Report
Indeed, STAYING ALIVE is haunted by Levertov's sister Olga, by friends who died, by the thousands dead in Vietnam...
and still I've not begun the poem,
the one she asked for ('If you would write me a poem
I could live for ever' - postmarked
the night she died, October twenty-ninth.)
- Part IV, iii. Two from the Fall Death-News
Olga, who was such a big part of the "Olga Poems" (obviously), doesn't appear in "Staying Alive" until the Third Part. Perhaps this is to play down Olga as the link between the "Olga Poems" and "Staying Alive". Indeed, there is more prominence in the personal and political currents that run through both cycles of poems...
Now I can barely remember what it is
to want oblivion. 'The dreamy lamps
of stonyhearted Oxford Street' -
de Quincy wandered
in hopeless search beneath them,
Olga rushed back and forth
for years beneath them, working
in her way for Revolution
and I too in my youth
knew them and was lonely, an ignorant girl.
- Part III, vi
Those are the same lamps
of my dream of Olga - the eel or cockle stand,
she in the flare caught, a moment, her face
painted, clownishly, whorishly. Suffering.
- Part IV, i. Report
The Third Part ends with a transcendental message. This is perhaps my favourite part of the STAYING ALIVE...
Bet said:
There was a dream I dreamed always
over and over,
a tunnel
and I in it, distraught
and great dogs blocking
each end of it
and I thought I must
always go on
dreaming that dream,
trapped there,
but Mrs. Simon listened
and said
why don't you sit down
in the middle of the tunnel
quietly:
imagine yourself
quiet and intent sitting there,
not running from blocked
exit to blocked exit.
Make a place for yourself
in the darkness
and wait there. Be there.
The dogs
will not go away.
They must be transformed.
Dream it that way.
Imagine.
Your being, a fiery stillness,
is needed to TRANSFORM
the dogs.
And Bet said to me:
Get down into your well,
it's your well
go deep into it
into your own depth as into a poem.
- Part III, ix
From the beginning of the First Part, Levertov asks: "Revolution or death." Rather she doesn't ask, she simple states: "Revolution or death." It is not a question but a statement, a fact that one must accept one or the other. This statement repeats throughout the cycle. She affirms her position in the beginning. She affirms her position in the end...
Revolution or death. Revolution or death.
Wheels would sing it
but railroads are obsolete,
we are among the clouds, gliding, the roar
a toneless constant.
Which side are you on?
Revolution, of course. Death is Mayor Daley.
- Part I, i
Yes, I want
revolution, not death: but I don't
care about survival, I refuse
to be provident, to learn automechanics,
karate,
soybean cookery,
or how to shoot.
- Part IV, iv. Daily Life
The poem ends with my favourite stanza...
O holy innocents! I have
no virtue but to praise
you who believe
life is possible...
- Part IV, v. Report
July 15, 2025
Some of the shorter poems here are justly known: "Life at War" and "Tenebrae." The majority of the volume is the long title poem, Levertov's most ambitious project up to this point. It begins in similar vein to those shorter poems, but interleaves extended sections that are much more personal. The tension of the poem hinges on the fact that the titular task is in fact about the revolutionaries, not (just) the people for whom they are fighting. The piece passes through a European holiday and two suicides before arriving at its resolutions: there comes a time when only anger / is love, yes, but not always. We must also "dare to reject / the unlived life." While the arc and conclusion are fulfilling, I'm not entirely sure that the poem was successful at the full scope of its undertaking.
November 16, 2021
“‘When the pulse rhythms / of revolution and poetry/ mesh,/ then the singing begins.’” In this collection, Levertov looks back on her years of involvement in the Vietnam War Resistance movement, retracing recurrent political themes that inform her poetry: “opposition to war, whose foul air we have breathed so long now we are almost choked forever by it, cannot be separated from opposition to the whole system of insane greed, of which war is only the inevitable expression.”
September 28, 2013
The beauty of this book is the way Denise Levertov reveals herself and her world in a long notebook type poem of the late 1960s...in the midst of the affirming protest movement against the death march we were engaged in in Vietnam. It is a poem of compassion and yes, anger, and she manages to internalize yet express that world for others. Her poetry takes a shape and intent it never had before. It is a living record of our time...something to be learned from. A remarkable read and sharing.
October 28, 2008
There comes a time when only anger is love.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews