Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960

by Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov’s Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960 brings under one cover the first published works of a poet who, though born and raised in Great Britain, has long held a distinctive place in postwar American letters. Initiating a major literary undertaking, the volume includes a group of hitherto ungathered poems, selections from Ms. Levertov’s earliest book, The Double Image (1946), published in London, and her three following collections in their entirety: Here and Now (1957), Overland to the Islands (1958), and With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1960). Living in the United States since the late 1940s, Ms. Levertov has often been associated with the Black Mountain poets, while from the mid- 1960s onward she has been one of the foremost activists in the antiwar and anti-nuclear movements. Yet even in her more “political” poems, her dominant perception has continued to be of the intricate beauty, the mystery of life as it is lived. In announcing Ms. Levertov the winner of the 1975 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Hayden Carruth said of her: “For twenty-five years Denise Levertov has been one of our most prominent poets… Today she is a woman at the crest of her maturity, acute in perceptions, wise in responses, and an artist, moreover, whose technique has kept pace with her personal development.” With Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960, readers have the opportunity of following Ms. Levertov’s remarkable poetic development from its very beginnings.

Genres: Poetry, Womens

133 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1979

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

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

clearly early work — still trying to find her footing

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collected Earlier Poems, 1940-1960 brings together Denise Levertov's first four books of poetry: The Double Image , Here and Now , Overland to the Islands , and With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads . Along with a selection of Levertov's early and uncollected poems.

Here are my favourites from the Early and Uncollected Poems...

Folding a shirt, a woman stands
still for a moment, to recall
warmth of flesh; her careful hands

heavy on a sleeve, recall
a gesture, or the touch of love;
she leans against the kitchen wall,

listening for a word of love,
but only finds a sound like fear
running through the rooms above.

With folded clothes she folds her fear,
but cannot put desire away,
and cannot make the silence hear.

Unwillingly she puts away
the bread, the wine, the knife,
smooths the bed where lovers lay,

while time's unhesitating knife
cuts away the living hours,
the common rituals of life.
- Folding a Shirt, pg. 6


Exciting not by excitment only; subtler:
'beautiful & unhappy''s not enough:
a woman engrossed
in delight or anguish or simply in passing
from point to point: stretched proudly
ready to twang or sing at pluck or stroke.
Northward: now her green eyes
are looking looking for a door
to open in a wall where
there's no door, none unless she make it:
an ice-wall to be broken by hand. Northward
in fact and in fact:
now her green eyes
spend their sea-depth & glitter
remotely; she's gone, who stays so strangely.
And we - we look at each other:
'Where should this music be?'
- A Woman, pg.12-13 

from The Double Image ...

If now you cannot hear me, it is because 
your thoughts are held by sounds of destiny
or turn perhaps to darkness, magnetized,
as a doomed ship upon the Manacles
is drawn to end its wandering and down 
into the stillness under rock and wave
to lower its bright figurehead; or else
you never heard me, only listening
to that implicit question in the shade,
duplicity that gnaws the roots of love.

If not I cannot see you, or be sure
you ever stirred beyond the walls of dream, 
rising unbroken battlements, to a sky
heavy with constellations of desire,
it it because those barricades are grown
too tall to scale, too dense to penetrate,
hiding the landscape of your distant life
in which you move, as birds in evening air
far beyond sight trouble the darkening sea
with the low piping of their discontent.
- The Barricades, pg. 21-22

from Here and Now ...

A night that cuts between you and you
and you and you and you
and me : jostles us apart, a man elbowing
through a crowd. We won't
 look at each other, either -
wander off, each alone, not looking
in the slow crowd. Among sideshows
 under movie signs,
 pictures made of a million lights,
 giants that move and again move
 again, above a cloud of thick smells,
 franks, roasted nutmeats -

Or going up to some apartment, yours
 or yours, finding
someone sitting in the dark:
who is it, really? So you switch the
light on to see: you know the name but
who is it?
 But you won't see.

The fluorescent light flickers sullenly, a
pause. But you command. It grabs
each face and holds it up
by the hair for you, mask after mask.
 You and you and you and I repeat
 gestures that make do when speech 
 has failed and talk
 and talk, laughing, saying
 'I', and 'I',
meaning 'Anybody'.
 No one.
 - People At Night, Derived from Rilke, pg. 33-34


 'The will is given us that
 we may know that
delights of surrender.' Blake with
tense mouth, couched small (great forehead,
somber eye) amid a crowd's tallness in a narrow room.
 The same night
a bird caught in my room, battered
from wall to wall, missing the window over & over
 (till it gave up and 
 huddled half-dead on a shelf, and I
 put up the sash against the cold)

and waking at dawn I again
pushed the window violently down, open
 and the bird gathered itself and flew
 straight out
 quick and calm (over the radiant chimneys -
 - The Flight, pg. 34

from Overland to the Islands ...

Not to take
that which is given, to overlook
the grace of it (these gradments
 of lives, broken off for you, or
 you might say drops of quicksilver
 alive, rolling for your eyes' pleasure)

not to take - th t's
the morality:
only desire for money is proof
money's deserved:
only expect echoes
merit attention

 not generosities; that the one ('pointless')
 lights itself, its whole span
 minute to minute, 'perception
 to perception,' - no crises
 dearly bought, forced up by leverage -
 but all of certain
 minutes of a certain life,

 while the other ('unpayable')
 lets you in - in! - to the presence of
 two, alone, who speak
 for a long time, a long
 time hardly moving,
 as people speak when alone, late, at last,
 at last speaking.

God knows there's enough
deprivation without
self-deprivation - because they tell you
the rules are broken! They gull you!
 Let you senses work, let
 your head heave its head. The end
 is pleasure, and the heart
 of pleasure: enlightenment,
 mystery:
 rhythm
 of their alternations, or best
 rarest and best,
 their marriage -
a grace, fire, bread, what
keeps you moving, keeps your eyes
wife with seeing,
having something to see.
- A Story, a Play, pg. 57-59


i

The peppertrees, the peppertrees!

Cats are stretching in the doorways, 
sure of everything. It is morning.
 But the peppertrees
stand aside in diffidence, with berries
of modest red.
 Branch above branch, an air
of lightness; of shadows
scattered lightly.
 A cat
close upon its shadow.
Up and up goes the sun,
sure of everything.
 The peppertrees
 shiver a little
Robust
and soot-black, the cat
leaps to a low branch. Leaves
close about him.

ii

The yellow moon dreamily
tipping buttons of light
down among the leaves. Marimba,
marimba - from beyond the
black street.
 Somebody dancing,
somebody
 getting the hell
outta here. Shadows of cats
weave round the tree trunks,
the exposed knotty roots.

iii

The man on the bed sleeping
defenseless. Look -
his bare long feet together
sideways, keeping each other
warm. And the foreshortened shoulders,
the head
barely visible. He is good.
let him sleep.
 But the third peppertree
 is restless, twitching
thin leaves in the light
of afternoon. After a while
it walks over and taps
on the upstairs window with a bunch
of red berries. Will he wake?
- Scenes from the Life of the Peppertrees, pg. 72-73

from With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads ...

Maybe it is true we have to return
to the black air of ashcan city
because it is there the most life was burned,

as ghosts or criminals return?
But no, the city has no monopoly
of intense life. The dust burned

golden or violet in the wide land
to which we ran away, images
of passion sprang out of the land

as whirlwind or red flowers, your hands
opened in anguish or clenched in violence
under that sun, and clasped my hands

in that place to which we will not return
where so much happened that no one else noticed,
where the city's ashes that we brought with us
flew into the intense sky still burning.
- Obsessions, pg. 93


i
A noon with twilight overtones
from open windows looking down.
Hell! it goes by. The trees
practice green in faithful measure.
It could be what I'm waiting for is
not here at all. Yet
the trees have it, don't they?
Absorbed in their own magic,
abundant, hermetic, wide open.

ii
The painting within itself,
a boy that had learned to whistle,
a fisherman. The painting
living its magic, admitting
nothing, being, the boy
pushing his hands further into his
pockets, the fisherman
beginning the day, in dew and half-dark,
by a river whose darkness
will be defined as brown in a
half-hour. The painting
suspended in itself, an angler
in the suspense of daybreak,
whistling to itself.

iii
Where the noon passes
in camouflage of twilight

doesn't cease to look 
into it from his oblique
angle, leafwise,
'. . . maintains dialog with his heart,'

doesn't spill the beans
balances like a papaya tree on a single
young elephant-leg.

iv
A glass brimming, not spilling,
the green trees
practising their art.
 'A wonder
 from the true world,'
he who accomplished it
 'overwhelmed with the wonder
 which rises out of his doing.'
- Notes of a Scale, pg. 103-105

[Juliette · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend gave me this book in high school. I loved it. I remember it being very dreamy and I think I read it during one of those beautiful mid-western change of seasons, all rosy cheeked, sad to see summer go, but excited about all that comes with fall.

[Bobbi Martens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes she's really amazing and sometimes just okay. At her best she understands and portrays human emotion (love, hope, fear, pain) in in a way I wish I could.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lean into solitude
you whose joy is a kite
now dragged in dirt, now
breaking the ritual of sky.

[Yecronopia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ah, por favor! Qué belleza la poesía.

[Ian]

All three collections, Poems 1968-1972, Poems 1972-1982, Collected Earlier Poems, 1940-1960 should be read and studied several times over. Levertov’s ability with imagery and structure are breathtaking. Her writing is filled with subtle movements, but also stark scenes which can mesmerize the reader. In Levertov’s writing, she creates mood and meditation not only through her metaphors and words but the structures of her poems.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection presents a portrait of the poetic imagination at work, from Levertov’s first published works to those that established her reputation as the foremost exponent of the Black Mountain School: a keen observer of detail, master image crafter, and skilled technician with a philosopher’s sensibility for subjects.

Favorite Poems:
“Listening to Distant Guns”
“Folding a Shirt”
“Illustrious Ancestors”
“The Artist”
“The Change”
“Obsessions”
“February Evening in New York”
“Fritillary”
“Art”

[Carrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I like mid Levertov more than early Levertov, and much more than late Levertov.

[Monica Macansantos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Remarkably brilliant at times, yet sometimes obtuse.

[Denise M · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoy her work.