Embracing Old Gods

Collected Earlier Poems—a selection from Denise Levertov’s earliest English book, The Double Image (1946), and her three following collections, Here and Now (1957), Overland to the Islands (1958), and With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1960)—has appropriately just come out from New Directions as a complement to Life in the Forest (1978), allowing us to trace Miss Levertov’s poetic development from its nervous English beginnings to the sensitive American balance of discourse and reflection. Composed for the most part in London in the Forties, the early and uncollected poems, tightly structured, already evince a desire for solitude and a celebration of the gifts of nature that are typical of the more mature Levertov. War is seen in them not as hatred or violence, but as mere lack of love, aridity of the spirit. What disturbs the writer is the boredom, the deprivation of wonder. In her Wordsworthian intimations she endeavors to survive, opposing inertia as if it were the real culprit, the root of many social evils. Mild intimations to be sure, but Miss Levertov’s poetics does indeed start here, when she declares that “to write of miracles is easy.” Beyond the imposture of war, she wants to touch the reality of love.

©Frans de Boer. Amsterdam

NC

About the Author

Nereo E. Condini

Collected Earlier Poems—a selection from Denise Levertov’s earliest English book, The Double Image (1946), and her three following collections, Here and Now (1957), Overland to the Islands (1958), and With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1960)—has appropriately just come out from New Directions as a complement to Life in the Forest (1978), allowing us to trace Miss Levertov’s poetic development from its nervous English beginnings to the sensitive American balance of discourse and reflection. Composed for the most part in London in the Forties, the early and uncollected poems, tightly structured, already evince a desire for solitude and a celebration of the gifts of nature that are typical of the more mature Levertov. War is seen in them not as hatred or violence, but as mere lack of love, aridity of the spirit. What disturbs the writer is the boredom, the deprivation of wonder. In her Wordsworthian intimations she endeavors to survive, opposing inertia as if it were the real culprit, the root of many social evils. Mild intimations to be sure, but Miss Levertov’s poetics does indeed start here, when she declares that “to write of miracles is easy.” Beyond the imposture of war, she wants to touch the reality of love.