Born of the Sun: A RealAudio Tribute to Dennis Levertov and other Great Women In Literature I think continually of those who were truly great. Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history Through corridors of light where the hours are suns Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition Was that their lips, still touched with fire, Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song...Born of the sun they...left the vivid air signed with their honor. -Sir Stephen Spender 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 Denise 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. Denise 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 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.

Levertov's Poetry at: The Academy of American Poets: The Métier of Blossoming Sojourns in the Parallel World The Great Black Heron In California During the Gulf War Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell St. Peter and the Angel Losing Track The Mutes The SecretOf Invisible Girls and Blue Herons An Interview with Denise Levertov by Mark White A Celebration of a Poet's Life By Kristin Kennell

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 1960's of the Vietnam War, 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. From 1975 to 1978, she was poetry editor of Mother Jones magazine. Levertov went on to publish more than twenty volumes of poetry, including Freeing 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, Washington, 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). In December 1997, Denise Levertov died from complications of lymphoma. She was seventy-four. -from The Academy of American Poets - Poetry Exhibits - Denise Levertov (author India Amos)

Marilyn Chin	Tess Gallagher	H.D.	Lucille Clifton
Diane Wakoski	June Jordan	Elizabeth Bishop	Gwendolyn Brooks
Muriel Rukeyser	Rita Dove	Joy Harjo	Marilyn Hacker
Adrienne Rich	Maxine Kumin	Sharon Olds	Carolyn Forché

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Theodore Roethke Anne Sexton Hart Crane

William Carlos Williams David Ignatow Jane Kenyon

John Kinsella