Abstract:William Butler Yeats posed the dilemma: one must choose the perfection of the life or of the work. Denise Levertov offers a refutation of that choice. As the world she responded with full engagement t...William Butler Yeats posed the dilemma: one must choose the perfection of the life or of the work. Denise Levertov offers a refutation of that choice. As the world she responded with full engagement to her historical environment. Her poetry of pro- test was written response to the major political issue of her time, the Vietnam War. She later confronted the tragedies of her personal life through her poetic craft, ultimately coming to a renewed sense of awe and wonder. In the last years of her life this avowed agnostic turned to faith, and the process produced a luminous and crys- talline poetry. Levertov acknowledges that writing poetry was her means to faith, that her work enfaithed. It is also true that her faith resulted renewed creativity and produced poetry in service to the transcendent. For Levertov, there was no choice between life and work; the desire for engagement and the consequent transfor- mation linked the two. Denise Levertov claimed few designations other than that of poet and pilgrim. At age seven or eight she intuited she was an artist; she soon understood her vocation was to poetry. When she was twelve she sent off her first clutch of poems to T. S. Eliot for critique, whoRead More
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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