Denise Levertov

1923–1997
Denise Levertov was born in Ilford, Essex, England, on October 24, 1923. Her father, raised a
Hasidic Jew, had converted to Christianity while attending university in Germany. By the time
Levertov was born, he had settled in England and become an Anglican parson. Her mother, who
was Welsh, read authors such as Willa Cather, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, and Leo Tolstoy
aloud to the family. Levertov was educated entirely at home and claimed to have decided to
become a writer at the age of five. When she was twelve, she sent some of her poetry to T. S.
Eliot, who responded with two pages of "excellent advice" and encouragement to continue
writing. At age seventeen she had her first poem published, in Poetry Quarterly.

During World War II, Levertov became a civilian nurse serving in London throughout the
bombings. She wrote her first book, The Double Image, while she was between the ages of
seventeen and twenty-one. The book, released in 1946, brought her recognition as one of a
group of poets dubbed the "New Romantics."

In 1947 Levertov married Mitchell Goodman, an American writer, and a year later they moved to
America. They settled in New York City, spending summers in Maine. Their son Nickolai was
born in 1949. She became a naturalized U. S. citizen in 1956.

After her move to the U. S., Levertov was introduced to the Transcendentalism
of Emerson and Thoreau, the formal experimentation of Ezra Pound, and, in particular, the work
of William Carlos Willams. Through her husband's friendship with poet Robert Creeley, she
became associated with the Black Mountain group of poets, particularly Creeley, Charles Olson,
and Robert Duncan, who had formed a short-lived but groundbreaking school in 1933 in North
Carolina. Some of her work was published in the 1950s in the Black Mountain Review. Levertov
acknowledged these influences but disclaimed membership in any poetic school. She moved
away from the fixed forms of English practice, developing an open, experimental style. With the
publication of her first American book, Here and Now (1956), she became an important voice in
the American avant-garde. Her poems of the fifties and sixties won her immediate and excited
recognition, not just from peers like Creeley and Duncan, but also from the avant-garde poets of
an earlier generation, such as Kenneth Rexroth and William Carlos Williams.

Her next book, With Eyes at the Back of our Heads (1959), established her as one of the great
American poets, and her British origins were soon forgotten. She was poetry editor of The
Nation magazine in 1961 and from 1963 to 1965. During the 1960s, activism and feminism
became prominent in her poetry. During this period she produced one of her most memorable
works of rage and sadness, The Sorrow Dance (1967), which encompassed her feelings toward
the war and the death of her older sister. She received a fellowship from the National
Endowment for the Arts in 1969. From 1975 to 1978, she was poetry editor of Mother
Jones magazine.
Levertov went on to publish more than twenty volumes of poetry, including The Freeing of the
Dust (1975), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She was also the author of four books
of prose, most recently Tesserae (1995), and translator of three volumes of poetry, among them
Jean Joubert's Black Iris (1989). From 1982 to 1993, she taught at Stanford University. She spent
the last decade of her life in Seattle, during which time she published Poems 1968-
1972 (1987), Breathing the Water (1987), A Door in the Hive (1989), Evening Train (1992), and The
Sands of the Well (1996). On December 20, 1997, Levertov died from complications of
lymphoma. She was seventy-four. New Directions published This Great Unknowing: Last
Poems in 1999 and The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov  in 2013. 

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov  (2013)

The Great Unknowing: Last Poems  (1999)
The Stream & the Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes (1997)
The Life Around Us: Selected Poems on Nature (1997)
The Sands of the Well  (1996)
Evening Train (1992)
A Door in the Hive (1989)
Breathing the Water (1987)
Poems 1968-1972 (1987)
Oblique Prayers: New Poems (1984)
Poems 1960-1967 (1983)
Candles in Babylon (1982)
Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960 (1979)
Life in the Forest (1978)
The Freeing of the Dust (1975)
Footprints (1972)
To Stay Alive (1971)
Relearning the Alphabet (1970)
The Sorrow Dance (1967)
O Taste and See: New Poems (1964)
The Jacob’s Ladder (1961)
With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1959)
Overland to the Islands (1958)
Here and Now (1956)
The Double Image (1946)

Prose

The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams (1998)

Tesserae: Memories & Suppositions (1995)
New & Selected Essays (1992)
Light Up the Cave (1981)
The Poet in the World (1973)

Anthology

Black Iris: Selected Poems by Jean Joubert (1989)

Selected Poems by Eugène Guillevic (1969)
In Praise of Krishna: Songs From the Bengali (1967)

"The Jacob’s Ladder" by Denise Levertov

Holly Anderson

Denise Levertov was born in England where she spent her formative years
with her mother and father.  He was born Jewish and later converted to
Christianity.  She described her mother’s family as Welsh Tailor and mystic
Angel Jones of Mold. “Levertov claimed a connection to her forefathers, both
mystical and Hasidic […] Hasidim, a sect of Judaism that emphasized the
soul’s communion with God […]” (2706). Levertov would eventually become
Roman Catholic; thus, giving her a solid religious foundation from which to
create her poetry.  Levertov married an American who in time brought her to
America and to a new style of writing for her that is strongly influenced by
William Carlos Williams.  Norton describes her poems as “[…] the inexplicable
nature of our ordinary lives and their capacity for unexpected beauty” (2707). 

The poem “The Jacob’s Ladder” is based on a scripture from the Bible in
Genesis 28:12-15. This scripture describes a ladder in Jacob’s dream, which
reaches from earth to heaven, and angels are ascending and descending on
it.  God then appears declaring to Jacob the future of his descendants. In the
final part of the dream, God explains that He is always with him.  It is at this
point Jacob awakes and determines to dedicate himself to God.

The poem follows Objective 1a, point 1 the romance narrative--describing a

quest or journey toward transcendence.

From the Bedford Glossary I found the qualities that best describes this poem
involve two interrelated attributes: mysticism and transcendentalism. 

Bedford describes mysticism as “The belief that some kind of knowledge or

special awareness can be acquired only through extrasensory means […]
Knowledge is acquired intuitively; it involves insight into something beyond
 what is discernible through thought or normal sensory perception. […]
mysticism frequently has an explicitly spiritual or religious character.

With her visual word usage to describe the ladder, a thing of gleaming strands
/a radiant evanescence, it is apparent this is a mystical experience, which is
creating a delicate connection between man and heaven.  With a continual
interchange of angels touching the lives of man, [W]ings brush past him, imply
a continuous interplay between man and heaven.

The second attributes, transcendentalism is described in the Bedford

Glossary as […] the conviction that each human being is innately divine, that
God’s essence lies within all individuals. […] contending that individuals have
the ability to discover higher truths intuitively or mystically, without recourse to
the senses or logic.  Indeed, transcendentalists suggested that reliance on
sensory experience and rational thought may actually impede the acquisition
of transcendent truths.

With this understanding of transcendentalism I am able to see the man as

trying to understand his higher truths, “and a man climbing/ must scrape his
knees, /and bring the grip of his hands into play.”  Ending with “The poem
ascends” could suggest that the poem itself is “understanding;” it ascends to
man and like in Jacob’s dream where God proclaims to be with him always,
man’s understanding is with him always.

The Jacob's Ladder Summary

(MASTERPIECES OF AMERICAN LITERATURE)

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Invoking the story of Jacob’s dream from Genesis 28:10-17, “The Jacob’s Ladder” utilizes the
dream as metaphor for poetic construction. The plot from Genesis maintains that when Jacob
came to rest his head at the end of the day, he dreamed that he saw God’s angels ascending
and descending a great ladder reaching from Earth to the heavens. God announced to Jacob
that all the land that he surveys should belong to him and his descendants, and his descendants
 should be so many that they would be as the dust is to the Earth. Jacob awakened and
acknowledged that this place upon which he had slept was holy and touched by God.

Levertov picks up the story and utilizes it as a leitmotif (with subtle emendation) for her thoughts
on a poetic construction that, she asserts, can approach the divine. In the poem, her narrator
observes that the ladder is, in fact, a stairway (possibly referring to one of many actual
geographical locations, such as the cut-in steps of Cheddar Gorge in the United Kingdom) of a
cut, rosy stone meant as much, if not more, for human steps as for those of angels, who would
not need to tread upon the tangible. However, the stairway itself is sharp, jagged, and a difficult
climb that scrapes the knees of the climber who would dare ascend it and approach God in
Heaven. Yet this pain, in some way, consoles the climber.

The last line suggests an interesting ambiguity in the poem, as it seems to imply that the
ascendant of the stairs is not a mortal but rather the poem itself ascending into the heavens.
This ambiguity is hardly minor, however, as the possible difference in meanings allows for a
shift in the agency of the written word: Does poetry come from a person, or is it inspired by
something incorporeal, living and breathing with its own life? That Levertov constructs the
stairway not as a mystical, gleaming thing made of evanescent materials but rather as one
made of rock lends to a particular reading, but even this thought becomes complicated as the
staircase sits in front of a doubting, gray skyline. The tenor of the piece suggests that the biblical
Jacob’s remarks are indeed true, but whether poetry is the stuff of the divine or the corporeal is
left for...

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The Elves
Poem by Denise Levertov
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Denise Levertov

Elves are no smaller

than men, and walk
as men do, in this world,
but with more grace than most,
and are not immortal.

Their beauty sets them aside

from other men and from women
unless a woman has that cold fire in her
called poet: with that

she may see them and by its light

they know her and are not afraid
and silver tongues of love
flicker between them.