In the Land of Shinar
In the Land of Shinar
Denise Levertov 1992
“In the Land of Shinar” was published in 1992 in Evening Train, Denise Levertov’s seventeenth volume of poetry. As many of her poems do, it contains an allusion to an ancient text, time, or place, even while it looks into the heart of the present and sees implications for the future. The “land of Shinar” is a reference to the place where the Tower of Babel was built, according to the Bible’s Old Testament book of Genesis. According to the story, the tower was constructed out of human ambition and the desire to “make a name for ourselves”; it thus provides a stark contrast to the Ark, which Noah built with divine specifications and blessing. In the world before Babel, says Genesis, “the whole earth had one language and the same words,” but God scattered the people and “confused their words,” splintering language into incomprehensible tongues before their arrogant project could be completed.
Levertov’s poem brings the Tower of Babel story into the twentieth century with new meaning. In the irregular, unrhymed, exploratory lines of “In the Land of Shinar,” the vivid details of labor, construction, and architecture—“mounting tier by lessening tier”—provide an image that can be superimposed on modern realities as concrete as a nuclear power facility or as abstract, though no less urgent, as the mounting, spiraling growth of technology, industrialism, and consumerism. Many of Levertov’s “prophetic” or political poems name specific times and places: Vietnam in 1966, Detroit in 1967, Berkeley in 1968, and California during the Gulf War. Others, such as “In the Land of Shinar,” leave local particulars unnamed, allowing the reader to make his or her own analogies to time and place, thereby extending the range and power of the allusion. Universally sinister images such as the “bird of prey” and the “full-moon night” in its “icy brilliance” are all framed by the growing darkness, “dense” with fear. The poem revives an ancient image of destruction, not only to lament the present darkness but also to warn us of its inevitable “fall upon us, the dwellers in shadow.”
Author Biography
Denise Levertov was born on October 24, 1923, in Ilford, Essex, England to parents she described as “protopoets.” Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones, grew up in a northern mining village in Wales and descended from Angel Jones of Mold, the mystic tailor whom Levertov recalled in an early poem titled “Illustrious Ancestors.” While teaching in Constantinople, Beatrice Jones met Paul Levertoff (who had altered the original Russian spelling of his surname), a young Russian Jew who descended from the legendary Rabbi Schneour Zalman, the founder of Habad Hasidism. When the two met, Levertoff had recently converted to Christianity. He became an Anglican priest, but he never abandoned Judaism; instead, he made the reconciliation of the two faiths his life’s work.
This rich synthesis of cultures and traditions was the air Denise Levertov breathed as a child. Her Welsh-Russian, Jewish-Christian family was not easily classified by the usual terms of middleclass life in Ilford, where Levertoff was a parish priest. For one thing, Denise and her older sister, Olga, were educated at home, and aside from nurse’s training during World War II, Levertov’s only formal education was in ballet. She read widely and voraciously in history and literature; took French, art, and piano lessons; and was a frequent visitor to the Victoria and Albert Museum and the London Library. She was constantly exposed to a variety of languages, spoken either by her parents or their many interesting guests. Out of this milieu, Levertov developed a profound love of art and music as well as a deep reverence for language. She also witnessed the power of “humanitarian politics” that seemed to grow naturally out of her parents’ religious convictions. Her “Autobiographical Sketch” recalls:
seeing my father on a soapbox protesting Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia; my father and sister both on soapboxes protesting Britain’s lack of support for Spain; my mother canvassing long before those events for the League of Nations Union; and all three of them working on behalf of German and Austrian refugees from 1933 onwards.
Along with all the political and religious intensity in the Levertoff household was a devotion to nature that Levertov absorbed as a very young child. The hours spent with her mother in their small, exotic garden and long rambles in the countryside with her sister created a decisive counterpoint to the suburban development she witnessed encroaching upon rural Essex. She recalled that the “monotonous row upon row of small ‘mock-Tudor’ houses I early learned to despise as jerry-built architectural monstrosities.” It is not difficult to hear an echo of this early dismay in the lines of “In the Land of Shinar,” as the poem describes the “bustle and clamor there was long ago / when the fields were cleared” for the monstrous architecture of Babel.
Denise Levertov began writing poems as a child, and she realized before she was twenty that poetry was to be her vocation. Poetry Quarterly published “Listening to Distant Guns” when she was only seventeen, and her first book, The DoubleImage, appeared in 1946. One year later she married Mitchell Goodman, an American soldier and writer she met in Paris. Their move to New York City in 1948 was a watershed event for Levertov’s work. Through her husband’s friendship with American poet Robert Creeley, Levertov became acquainted with Robert Duncan, H. D., and, most important, with William Carlos Williams, who encouraged what he perceived as Levertov’s original and powerful new voice. As Levertov’s ear became attuned to the rhythm and color of American speech, her poetry took new directions and became recognized for its luminous attention to the ordinary. Like Williams, she rejected formal metrics and traditional verse patterns in favor of poems that grew out of attention to the present and to the natural rhythms of breathing and speaking. Levertov’s first American-published books, Here and Now (1956) and Overland to the Islands (1958), received wide acclaim, and she began to be recognized in the United States as a substantial figure in the “new poetry.”
As the United States moved into the tumultuous 1960s, Denise Levertov “listened to the distant guns” of Vietnam and became directly involved in political protest and demonstrations. Her intense political convictions of these years is especially reflected in the poems of The Sorrow Dance (1967) and To Stay Alive (1971). Many admired her work during those years for its uncompromising conscience; others criticized her for “abandoning a poetry of presence” so characteristic of her earlier, lyrical work for a “poetry of politics.” The early 1970s were filled with turbulence—not only in national affairs, but in her personal life. Her divorce from Mitch Goodman in 1972 occupies much of the emotional terrain of The Freeing of the Dust (1975), even while she moves into a more intense attention to the natural world. From the 1960s to the early 1990s, Levertov taught poetry at a number of colleges and universities on both the East and West coasts, including Vassar, Tufts, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brandeis, New York University, and Stanford. Her contributions to poetry brought her numerous honorary doctorates and prestigious prizes over the years, including the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Robert Frost Medal, and the Lannan Prize.
Levertov remained politically active well into the 1990s. One can see that neither the early “poetry of presence” nor the mid-years’ “poetry of protest” were merely passing stages. Nor were they aesthetics opposed to one another. Those concerns recur as motifs in her poems, inflected by what she perceived as the most urgent crises of the time—El Salvador, Iraq, Bosnia, nuclear proliferation, destruction of the environment, and language abuse. Those concerns are present alongside poems that express a quiet but vibrant spirituality and a reverent attention to the work of artists, musicians, other poets, and, not least, to nature. While living in Seattle, Levertov’s frequent forest walks and a Cezanne-like “study” of Mount Rainier were transformed into poems that readers have perceived as among her most musical and radiant. These works can be found in Evening Train (1992) and Sands of the Well (1996). Well into her seventies, with more than two dozen volumes of poetry, prose, and translations to her credit, Denise Levertov showed no sign of artistic decline, despite her failing health. To many readers, she seemed to be at the height of her vocation when she died in Seattle in December of 1997 from complications of lymphoma. She left behind a manuscript of poems posthumously published in 1999 as This Great Unknowing: Last Poems.
Poem Text
Each day the shadow swings
round from west to east till night overtakes it,
hiding
half the slow circle. Each year
the tower grows taller, spiralling
out of its monstrous root-circumference, ramps and 5
colonnades
mounting tier by lessening tier the way a searching
bird of prey wheels and mounts the sky, driven
by hungers unsated by blood and bones.
And the shadow lengthens, our homes nearby are
dark
half the day, and the bricklayers, stonecutters, 10
carpenters bivouac
high in the scaffolded arcades, further and further
above the ground,
weary from longer and longer comings and goings.
At times
a worksong twirls down the autumn leaf of a
phrase, but mostly
we catch
only the harsher sounds of their labor itself, and 15
that seems only
an echo now of the bustle and clamor there was
long ago
when the fields were cleared, the hole was dug, the
foundations laid
with boasting and fanfares, the work begun.
The tower, great circular honeycomb, rises and
rises and still
the heavens 20
arch above and evade it, while the great shadow
engulfs
more and more of the land, our lives
dark with the fear a day will blaze, or a full-moon
night defining
with icy brilliance the dense shade, when all the
immense
weight of this wood and brick and stone and metal 25
and massive
weight of dream and weight of will
will collapse, crumble, thunder and fall,
fall upon us, the dwellers in shadow.
Poem Summary
Lines 1-3
The opening image of “In the Land of Shinar” introduces the “shadow” created by the rhythmic rising and setting of the sun upon some yet unnamed feature of the landscape. By delaying the identity of the shadow’s source, the darkness itself begins to acquire an important role in the poem.
Lines 3-8
The phrase “Each year” at the end of line 3 echoes the “Each day” of line 1 and leads into the description of a slowly, deliberately built tower, which is the source of the shadow. The description of a spiraling tower, with its tiers of “ramps and colonnades,” is strikingly similar to a painting by sixteenth-century Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel. His Tower of Babel shows the legendary edifice in an unfinished state, exposing the massive structure of ramps and colonnades that dwarfs the village and coastline bordering its “monstrous root circumference.” Given that image, there is no doubt that the shadow is a baleful darkness and that, at its foundation, the tower is associated with something dangerous—like a coiling serpent or the choking roots of a poisonous plant. Lines 6 to 8 compare the architecture of the tower to a “bird of prey” that flies higher and higher in search for what will satisfy its unnatural appetite. The metaphor suggests that human ambition also loses sight of its natural, healthy limits and that its hunger for “more” and “better” is never satisfied.
Lines 9-18
As the tower rises, “the shadow lengthens,” and darkness increases. Work and workers are no longer close to the earth; they are no longer “grounded” in the resources of light and ordinary life. As the work site rises “further above ground,” the air becomes thinner, and the distances longer
Media Adaptations
- The Acolyte is a recording made in April of 1985 of Denise Levertov reading her work from books that span forty-five years. It is available from Watershed Tapes of Washington, D.C.
- The website for The American Academy of Poets, www.poets.org, contains well-researched information on Denise Levertov, including a short biography, the texts of several poems, and an up-to-date bibliography of her poems, prose, and translations. The site also shares numerous links to other Levertov exhibits on the web, including her last published interview, a working manuscript, audio-file readings of poems, and texts of speeches.
from source to site. Work becomes exhausting rather than fulfilling. The workers also appear abstracted, removed from the nourishing rituals and pleasures associated with labor in home and field. Only the “autumn leaf of a phrase” of “a worksong” can be heard, with “autumn” suggesting the dying days of any beauty once associated with work.
It’s not the song “we catch,” says line 14, whose short length makes a teasing visual pause; rather, we hear “the harsher sounds” of labor. And even those are merely an echo, since we, living below, are now quite far removed from the “bricklayers, stonecutters, [and] carpenters” laboring high above in tenuous, “scaffolded arcades.” Finally, there is no doubt, given the first-person, plural pronouns in these lines, that this tower is being built not just in ancient legend, but in our own place and time. It is “our homes” that are dark; “we catch” the echoes of exhausted labor.
Lines 19-21
In their description of the tower as a “great circular honeycomb,” these lines draw even closer to Brueghel’s painting. The Flemish painter rendered the Tower in honey-toned brick and stone, and its ascending series of arched doors and colonnades clearly resembles the diseased cells of a massive honeycomb, with disorganized workers crawling about its inhospitable surfaces like insects.
The last sentence of the poem, which begins in line 19, is one long series of enjambed lines. When a poem employs enjambment, there is no grammatical break from one line to the next; instead, the sentence, phrase, or clause continues in the next line of the poem. Enjambment often increases the sense of movement and allows the poet to position words for special emphasis at the beginnings and ends of the lines. The enjambed, or run-on, lines in the last third of “In the Land of Shinar” imitate both the tower’s rising, circular form and its inevitable, thunderous collapse. Lines 19 through 21 suggest that no matter what height human pride reaches, “still / the heavens / arch above and evade it.” “The heavens” are, therefore, set apart on a line, in graphic parallel with “arch” and “evade.”
Lines 21-28
From that height, the poem descends to the tower’s final prophetic collapse, as the shadow grows to monstrous proportions and “engulfs / more and more of the land.” Sun and moon are no longer natural and beneficent; instead, they also participate in “defining ... the dense shade.” An accelerating series of nouns and verbs in lines 25 to 27 mimics the collapse of the Tower, while enjambment enables the poem to chant “will ... fall” at the ends and beginnings of the last three lines. By the end of the poem, all that has risen has fallen, and the poem’s prophetic voice spares no one. There is no “them” to counter the “us” in the last line. We are all “dwellers in shadow,” and what falls, falls upon all.
Themes
Science and Technology
Even though the dominant image of this poem is derived from an ancient Hebrew text, there is a timelessness about “In the Land of Shinar” that gives it the ability to speak for such tower building—both literal and figurative—in nearly any time and place. Given Denise Levertov’s ambivalence about modern technology and her strong antinuclear stance, it is not difficult to see, for example, the towers of a nuclear power facility in the poem’s rising “circular honeycomb.” Levertov’s vigorous position against nuclear proliferation took her to New Hampshire in 1978 to protest the Seabrook power facility, to participate in various nuclear freeze rallies in the early 1980s, as well as to write many poems, such as “Concurrence,” which holds in fragile tension “Each day’s terror,” along with “each day one, / sometimes two, morning-glories.” Likewise, “An English Field in the Nuclear Age” reveals the poet’s fervent commitment “To render it!—this moment,” meaning
... this oak,
these dogrose pallors, that very company
of rooks plodding
from stile to stile of the sky
even while ‘dread / holds its breath.’
Alongside of her passionate attention to both the shadows and wonders of the present, Denise Levertov expressed her sense of being an anachronism—of somehow not belonging to her own time—and longing instead for the nineteenth century when, says one poem, “Virtue ... was confident / of its own powers.” This feeling was more than nostalgia for some illusory, “simpler” time. Because of her vast reading of history and her active engagement in political and social movements, Levertov was well aware that no time or place is without its shadows, wars, poverties, and perversions of spirit: “Yes, you had your own horrors, your dirt, disease, / profound injustices,” one poem speaks honestly.
When Levertov spoke of her alienation from our age, however, it was usually coupled with a critique of technology—specifically, the misuse of its powers. Levertov was wary of many “advances” in science and technology, unless their humanitarian benefits were clear. For example, she believed that the computer had become too powerful and defining in our age, even while she recognized its gifts to medical research and treatment. She was concerned that, in our fascination with the power to simulate, we might ultimately construct a “virtual” cosmology that will abandon the earth, destroying our ground of being.
In her Tower of Babel poem, Levertov has revived a ancient legend that serves as a template for this critique of postmodern reason. Like the tower, each year our developments in technology spiral higher and higher, “further and further above the ground.” We work increasingly abstracted from the “fields” that were cleared for the tower’s foundation, as our “mounting” effort removes us from nature and its rhythms. Levertov translates this “Babel” behavior into twentieth-century terms in “Those Who Want Out,” a poem from A Door in the Hive (1989) whose essential protest is in unison
Topics for Further Study
- Work songs are an ancient genre of music whose examples can be found in nearly every culture, time, and place. Study the similarities and differences in work songs from different periods and cultures. Compose two work songs that contrast the music of “dressing and keeping” a garden with “the harsher sounds” of constructing an ambitious edifice.
- Study the life and work of Pieter Brueghel, the Flemish painter whose Tower of Babel so closely matches the description of the tower in Levertov’s poem. How is this painting characteristic of Brueghel’s work? How does it differ? What was his purpose, in the seventeenth century, of re-imagining the ancient Jewish story?
- Choose two or three examples of engineering or construction disasters from this century and examine the available information concerning their causes. Report on any political or legal complexities involved in the investigations.
- In the manner of Levertov’s “In the Land of Shinar,” write a poem, story, or short play that invests an ancient legend with contemporary significance.
with “In the Land of Shinar.” In our scientific and technological hubris, or pride, we have constructed “controlled environments” that we believe will protect us from the inconveniences of nature. The poem is a transparent rebuke of artificial, inorganic environments—“much glass and steel,” “fluorescent light,” “state-of-the-art ski machines”—and reveals Levertov’s palpable disgust for the thought of a life
way out there, outside of ‘nature,’ unhampered,
a place contrived by man, supreme
triumph of reason. They know it will happen.
They do not love the earth.
In our growing technological prowess, these poems suggest, we are building towers—nuclear, cyber, and otherwise—that cast ever more engulfing shadows. In Levertov’s poetic imagination, this “city in space” is simply one modern rendering of the ancient blueprint from Shinar.
Language and Meaning
“In the Land of Shinar” has much to suggest about power—not just the power of labor and technology, but of language. Years ago, in The Poet in the World (1973), Denise Levertov spoke of a reverence for language that cannot be separated from her sense of vocation: “The poet’s task is to hold in trust the knowledge that language ... is not a set of counters to be manipulated, but a Power.” Levertov’s comments there and in other essays suggest that language abuse has direct connections with the growing abuses of human beings and the earth. As a poet, Levertov believed she was called to hold language “in sacred trust,” to keep it alive against the encroaching “shadow.” In “Relearning the Alphabet,” an important sequence from the late 1960s, the poet takes her own words and brushes them back “to the fire’s core” of language, not to erase them, but to purify and transform them for the task.
As she wrote “In the Land of Shinar,” Levertov was undoubtedly aware of the significant role that language plays in the Tower of Babel story. According to the writer of Genesis 11, the whole earth “had one language and the same words” after the waters receded from the great flood that destroyed all but Noah’s Ark and its inhabitants. This linguistic unity seems all the more significant, given the way that the preceding chapter has named the descendants of Noah’s three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, each “in their lands, ... with [their] own language.” Thus, while there appear to have been distinct languages among these peoples, the story implies that the various nations of the earth could understand one another. The wholeness of meaning or communication implied by such a language seems miraculous—a vestige of Eden or paradise, a mythic example of “unity within diversity.” But then the people of Shinar misused the power of this language to serve their own purposes, and the Old Testament text puts both crime and punishment in linguistic terms. The people of Shinar sought to “make a name for [them]selves”; consequently, God “confused” their language and scattered them “over the face of all the earth.”
As a kind of pourquoi Tate, the Babel story supplies one mythic “reason why” many language groups are so disparate in their sounds and structures and why what we today call “non-native” languages must be taught and cannot be simply apprehended or intuited. In Levertov’s poem, only a remnant of that original “one language” remains—in the “autumn leaf of a phrase,” the dying fall of a “worksong.” Levertov believed that language approached song when revered as a “Power” and held in “sacred trust.” What replaces the music of language in this poem are the “harsher sounds of labor.” In the world of Babel, language appears to have become a system of random squeaks and grunts entirely emptied of meaning, save some immediate “use.” Unmoored from their original power, words can be made to mean anything that the “weight of will” designs, and, thus, they contribute to that deepening shadow she also described in “The Whisper”—that “world / of terror, filling up fast with / unintelligible / signs.”
Style
It is tempting to call the style of “In the Land of Shinar” free verse, because a quick reading reveals the poem’s lack of regular meter, line length, and rhyme pattern. By the fourth line, we see that enjambment and line breaks, rather than formal metrics, dictate much of the breathing and pace of the poem. It is more profitable, however, to look at the style of this poem in light of Levertov’s desire for a more precise terminology. For reasons she outlined in the essay “On the Need for New Terms,” Levertov preferred the term “exploratory form” for those poems that have sought, and found, a form that reveals the unique content of a moment of perception and feeling. There must be form, Levertov insists; otherwise there is no art.
Vers libre (“free verse”) was a term first employed in nineteenth-century France for poems that rebelled against the alexandrine meter. Levertov argued that by the late twentieth century, the term “free verse” had come to be used “for every kind of poem that is not written in a traditional form,” and thus “implies the rejection of every restriction.” When most critics use the term “free verse” today, they are describing, she said, “a certain invertebrate sort of poem that meanders along in search, perhaps, of its still undiscovered form.” A free-verse poem is not ready to be art until the poet turns from “meandering” to a more intentional “exploring,” which results in forms Levertov called “vertebrate and cohesive.”
Thus, to critique “In the Land of Shinar” in Levertov’s own terms is to examine its “exploratory form”—to look for the ways in which the poem’s form reveals its content. This poem becomes “vertebrate and cohesive” in its focused attention on the Tower of Babel and the shadow it casts. Its lines explore the subject by re-presenting the rise and fall of the tower. The poem begins and ends with “the shadow,” and, in between, we witness both the steady growth of darkness and the final terror of collapse. At the height of building, in the middle of the poem (lines 10 through 19), the lines are appropriately at their longest. But two very short lines (14 and 20) interrupt that confident progress. The phrase “We catch” is poised in air, like the falling strain of the “worksong.” The next line reveals, however, that it is not a song we catch; it is only noise. Likewise, the words “the heavens” are held “aloft” on line 20 via their placement far toward the right margin. This arrangement uses visual form to reinforce the important idea that the heavens “arch” and “evade” our human striving. Because of the way these short lines appear on the page—with syntactic cohesion—the poem fairly begs us to explore what happens when they are read together: “we catch ... the heavens.” That, of course, is the delusion that motivates the builders of any such tower. Not by these means or motivations, the poem suggests in both form and content, will we “catch the heavens.” The final lines “fall” back to the left margin, undoing, in an avalanche of verbs and nouns, all that our “massive / weight of dream and weight of will” has built in vain. The particular form of “In the Land of Shinar” is not “re-usable.” Levertov believed that every poem calls for a form unique to its “inscape,” the inner landscape of its feeling, its perception, and the moment of awareness it explores.
Historical Context
“In the Land of Shinar” was published in Evening Train in 1992 and is the last poem of the section Levertov subtitled “Witnessing from Afar.” The section gets its title, in part, from “Witnessing from Afar the New Escalation of Savage Power,” a poem Levertov composed between January and March of 1991, the period of the United States’ active conflict in the Persian Gulf War. The Gulf War broke out on August 2, 1990, when Iraq invaded the tiny, oil-rich country of Kuwait and seized its petroleum reserves. When Iraq refused to withdraw, the U.N. Security Council ordered a trade and financial boycott, formed a naval blockade, and cut off all oil
Compare & Contrast
- 1978: On April 27, fifty-one workers were killed at the construction site of the Willow Island, West Virginia, nuclear power plant. The accident occurred when scaffolding collapsed inside a cooling tower and workers fell 170 feet and were buried under tons of concrete.
1978: Calling themselves the Seabrook Natural Guard, more than two thousand antinuclear protesters thronged the construction site of a nuclear power plant at Seabrook, New Hampshire, on April 30. Others joined the protest in Manchester, New Hampshire, and Washington, D. C. Within three days, nearly 1,500 protesters had been arrested.
1988: The Public Service Co. of New Hampshire filed for bankruptcy due to controversy surrounding the completed, but still unlicensed Seabrook nuclear power plant. The facility had been completed in 1986 at a cost of 5.2 billion dollars but had not been granted an operating license by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) because of disputes over emergency evacuation plans. - 1959: The U.S. Army launched and recovered two monkeys in a 300-mile-high space flight. The first seven U. S. astronauts were also picked by NASA to train for orbit of the earth in a Project Mercury space capsule. The Discoverer, Explorer, and Vanguard satellite programs achieved twelve successful launchings.
1967: During Apollo tests at Cape Canaveral, a launch-pad fire caused by a faulty electrical wire killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.
1969: Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin, and Michael Collins achieved the first manned lunar landing. When he became the first man to ever set foot on the moon, Armstrong remarked, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The crew returned safely to Earth with many samples after a two-and-a-half hour moon walk and six days in space.
1981: The space shuttle Columbia, the first “reusable” spacecraft, completed its first two missions. It was the first spacecraft to make a wheels-down landing.
1986: The space shuttle Challenger exploded 74 seconds after liftoff, killing all seven astronauts aboard, including Christa McAuliffe, a 37-year-old Concord, New Hampshire, teacher—the first person ever chosen from the private sector to fly into space. In April and May, a Titan rocket exploded and a Delta rocket failed, leaving the U.S. space program facing severe criticism.
1995: American astronaut Norman Thagard returned to Earth after a record-breaking two months in space aboard the Russian space station Mir, which had linked with the American shuttle Atlantis.
exports from Iraq and Kuwait. Believing that Saudi Arabia was also threatened by Iraqi aggression, the United States ordered troops and supplies into the Saudi kingdom. By early November, the United States had amassed some 230,000 troops in the region and began preparing to use armed force if Iraq failed to meet U. N. Security Council demands for a withdrawal by January 15, 1991.
Led by the United States, seventeen allied nations launched “Operation Desert Storm” against Iraq, as promised, on January 15th. Despite weeks of air attacks, Iraq clung to its agenda, until President George Bush authorized a ground war on February 24th. The fighting halted three days later, but left in its wake a nightmarish landscape of burning oil fields, starving civilians, and evidence of atrocities committed by participants representing both sides of the conflict. Levertov responded to the news with several poems, including “News Report, September, 1991: “U.S. Buried Iraqi Soldiers Alive in Gulf War.” The poem lets the story speak for itself in a series of rearranged quotes from the report, beginning with “’ What you saw was a/bunch of trenches with / arms sticking out’” and ending, ironically, with “‘Cost-effective.’” While teaching at Stanford University amidst a landscape “exhausted by five years of drought,” she wrote “In California During the Gulf War.” There she juxtaposes the miraculous, perennial appearance of “certain airy white blossoms” with “the crimes committed / —again, again—in our name.” With dark allusions to the Old Testament story of Noah’s Ark, the poem asserts finally, and sadly, that
No promise was being accorded, the blossoms
were not doves, there was no rainbow. And when it
was claimed
the war had ended, it had not ended.
Several poems in “Witnessing from Afar” are responses to what Levertov calls our “living at war,” not only in the literal sense, but wherever “the prime force of antilife and oppression” casts its shadow (in the words of a speech from the early 1970s). The Gulf War represents what Levertov perceived as only one form of our “new escalation in savage power” among several other forms of “antilife.” “Tragic Error,” “Misnomer,” and “Mysterious Disappearance of May’s Past Perfect” are each concerned with the consequences of language erosion and the misuse of the words. “Watching TV” and “The Youth Program” lament the transformation of our souls as we take in our “wretched history” from the screen and exchange our children’s “Arthurian picturebooks” for video games. Not least, as “The Batterers” reveals, Levertov sees a nearly seamless analogy between the rise of domestic violence and continued assaults on earth, despite the heightened awareness in recent decades of our ecosystems’ fragility.
During the period Levertov was writing these poems, the worst oil spill in U. S. history occurred. Exxon Corporation’s supertanker Valdez ran aground Alaska’s Prince William Sound in March of 1989, dumping 240,000 barrels of crude oil into the sea. It is estimated that more than 500,000 birds and animals suffered or died from the effects, as the oil spread throughout 730 miles of coastline. The tanker’s captain was alleged to have been drinking, leaving the vessel’s control to an uncertified officer. Tragedies at sea, including the steady destruction of life-supporting coral reefs, are matched on land, as over-population puts more and more demands on the earth’s surface. One National Geographic report estimates that American farmland is being transformed to suburban sprawl at a rate of fifty acres per hour, but speculates that “perhaps nothing has so dramatized the alteration of earth’s surface by human use as the destruction of tropical forests,” home of countless animal and plant species and a major natural processor of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. The rise of carbon dioxide (CO2) is a major cause of global warming, which alters every form of life on earth. Tropical forests once covered four billion acres on four continents; less than half of that amount remains.
It is characteristic of Levertov’s poems to mourn such losses, but not before showing us what has been lost. Levertov’s many poems of luminous wonder and celebration give the shadow cast at Shinar an even harder, more terrible edge. Taken together, her poems of joy and warning confront her readers with an inescapable choice. We can lay more bricks in the tower, perpetuating an ancient, “tragic error,”
The earth is the Lord’s, we gabbled,
and the fullness thereof—
while we looted and pillaged, claiming indemnity:
the fullness thereof
given over to us, to our use—
while we preened ourselves, sure of our power,
wilful or ignorant, through the centuries.
Or, we can take up our original task as human beings
to love the earth—
to dress and keep it like Eden’s garden.
Critical Overview
While “In the Land of Shinar” has received little individual attention amidst the criticism of Levertov’s later work, it nevertheless represents what Janet Tassel deemed the “confluence of her politics and her muse.” The comment demonstrates that both Levertov and her critics have traveled quite a distance since the year (1972) that saw the publication of To Stay Alive, a volume the poet offered as “a document of some historical value, a record of one person’s inner / outer experience in America during the ‘60’s and the beginning of the ‘70’s.” That book simply wasn’t poetry, claimed critic Marie Boroff: “Poetic forms are repeatedly laid aside, as if felt inadequate for the rendering of actual life.” Charles Altieri was also disappointed that Levertov seemed unable to “adapt her poetic to pressing social concerns caused by the war in Vietnam.” Despite the negative criticism, however, Levertov continued writing and refining her “political” poetry, explaining to an interviewer in 1983:
Look. An artist is only an artist when he or she lives and works in the world, not in a ‘whited sepulchre.’ If artists, with their finely tuned receptors and their gift of reaching people, don’t act on their deepest moral commandments, who on Earth should? They won’t write bad poetry unless they’re bad poets; good poets don’t use poetry, poetry uses them.
As Levertov’s corpus and her reputation grew, her political and moral convictions continued in “confluence” with her spirituality; this is especially apparent in Candles in Babylon (1981) and subsequent volumes. Critics Joan Hallisey, Linda Wagner-Martin, and Joyce Lorraine Beck all recognize that the complex weave of Levertov’s Hasidic and Christian heritage has enriched her poetry from the beginning, incorporating, says Beck, an “abiding unwillingness to separate religious issues from human ones.” In her later work, Levertov’s more explicit Christian images represent not a narrowing of concern, but evidence, for Denise Lynch, of how “Levertov channels her political commitment and ‘rebellious caritas’ into conventional gestures of faith, and infuses the joy of spiritual community into the isolate poetic act.” As a result, Lynch continues, “even the terror of a nuclear age yields to the numinous moment.”
In his essay on the garden motif in Levertov’s work, Edward Zlotkowski finds evidence for the growing interaction between her “journey of art and the journey of faith.” Poems throughout Levertov’s canon suggest to Zlotkowski that “to be in the garden, to return to the garden, is to claim one’s original birthright of joy, creativity, and proximity to the divine.” But the vision of Eden and paradise is also subject to loss. “In the Land of Shinar” reveals what happens when humankind becomes separated from the divine and expelled, as it were, from Eden. In what Zlotkowski calls Levertov’s “imaginative integrity,” the prophesied fall of the tower is distinct neither from the mythic Fall, nor from the very present consequences of morally misguided technological, military, or industrial projects.
Criticism
Emily Archer
Emily Archer is an independent scholar and freelance writer who has taught at colleges in the South and the Northeast, has published many articles on contemporary American writers, and leads poetry workshops and reading groups in New Hampshire. In the following essay, Archer examines the relationship of poetry and prophecy in “In the Land of Shinar” and other poems from Denise Levertov’s 1992 volume, Evening Train.
Here and Now (1956) is the title of the second book of poetry Denise Levertov published, her first in America. But it is not simply the title of one book; it is an emblem for her unflagging engagement, over five decades, with history in the making, the here and now. In “Poetry, Prophecy, Survival,” one of her most important aesthetic statements as a mature artist, Levertov asserts, “I think the arts are—among other things—a way into history.” This statement counters the suggestion posed to her that the arts are an “evasion,” collective or personal, from the tragedies and complexities of the world. The poet’s “way into history,” for Levertov, involves creating both a “poetry of anguish” and a “poetry of praise.” What emerges not only from her essay, but from the whole body of her poems, is a portrait of the artist as prophet. And while nearly any volume could provide significant features in this portrait, Evening Train (1992) captures the lights and shadows of Levertov’s maturity, revealing the motifs characteristic of her legacy.
In 1972, when NBC-TV invited Levertov to “comment on any topic, e.g., poetry, women, the war,” she prefaced her response with a definition of the poet’s task: “to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.” The task at that specific moment was to state what history was asking of her art, to be
writing more and more poems of grief, of rage, concerning the despoilment of the earth and of all life upon it, of the systematic destruction of all that we feel passionate love for, both by the greed of industry and by the mass murder we call war. We are living at war....
The producer chose not to air the statement, thinking it “inappropriate” in light of “the number of Vietnam statements we have already had on the program.” Levertov not only found the rejection “in the name of ‘balanced coverage’ ... a little short on sincerity,” but also felt that “a ‘balanced’ view of genocide and of actions which are leading directly toward the extinction of life on earth is itself a kind of insanity.”
“In the Land of Shinar,” published twenty years later in Evening Train, suggests that the world is no
What Do I Read Next?
- In her “Author’s Note” to Tesserae: Memories and Suppositions (1995), Denise Levertov explains both the title and the purpose of this prose collection: “These tesserae have no pretensions to forming an entire mosaic. They are merely fragments, composed from time to time in between poems.” The “fragments” she speaks of are numerous incidents and memories from her personal history, including vignettes of her father’s childhood in Russia; her pilgrimage to Cezanne’s studio; sketches of childhood friends, pets, and dolls; her last hours in Tonga in the late 1970s; and formative memories of “not meeting” artists. Aside from an essay-length “sketch,” this book is the closest Levertov comes to writing autobiography.
- William Carlos Williams, one of the most important voices in modern American poetry, was an unofficial, but powerful “mentor” of Denise Levertov. She met Williams shortly after moving to New York from England and learned from him important ways of hearing American speech, seeing the world, and persisting in her work. The friendship that emerged through their many visits and letters is revealed in The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams (1998), recently collected and edited by Christopher MacGowan and published by New Directions. It is not merely the chronicle of an artistic friendship but a window into the formation of American poetry in this century.
- Denise Levertov’s childhood was steeped in rich stories from her father’s Jewish Hasidic background. German-Jewish theologian Martin Buber, author of the classic I and Thou (1958), became interested in the legends of Hasidism and collected them in his two-volume work, The Tates of the Hasidim (1975). Buber also compiled twenty stories of the Baal-Shem, legendary founder of Hasidim, in The Legend of the Baal-Shem (1955). In this work, the Hasidic master’s life is “told” through the fantastic, humorous, and always profound stories that “contain the dream and the longing of a people.” Even a few stories, along with the introductions from Buber’s collections, can help readers mine the rich implications of Hasidic terms in Levertov’s poems, as well as introduce them to a fascinating body of folklore.
- Long ago, poetry—in the form of epics, song cycles, ballads, and psalms—was the primary means for sharing and teaching a culture’s values, stories, and visions. Considering our age of multiculturalism and mass media, Dana Gioia asked a relevant question that became the title of his popular and controversial book, Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (1992). Gioia is concerned that poets have unwittingly (or not) backed themselves into a corner of society that is increasingly ignored, except by other poets belonging to its “subculture.” The “Poetry in Motion” project, which displays poems in mass transit vehicles across the United States is one answer to the problem Gioia describes.
closer to peace. “Each year / the tower grows taller,” the poem says (in an allusion to the ill-fated Tower of Babel), as our lethal insanity spirals “out of its monstrous root-circumference.” Long after the war in Vietnam ended, Levertov continued to “sing and say” all that she could about a world she believed more and more to resemble the “land of Shinar,” engulfed in a “great shadow” of its own making and imminent unmaking. But it is not enough for Levertov to rage against this ominous “dying of the light.” Her task also requires singing all that can be sung about the wonder, beauty, and mystery of the here and now, in “poignant contrast ... to the evil we are conscious of day and night.” Her laments accrue their stirring power for her readers, in part, because she is also such an artist of praise. In the words of a Shaker tune, her poems show us how to “bow and be simple” before the humblest members of creation, seeing in them a presence that deserves recognition and reverence. In her poems of praise, Levertov shows us what we could lose, and it is more than we realized.
Thus, in every decade of Levertov’s work, readers can find poems that mourn and warn alongside of poems that celebrate. Evening Train laments with the voice of a Jeremiah in poems such as “The Certainty” and “In the Land of Shinar.” But the volume also sings as a psalmist, raptly present to Presence on her walks in the forest, in her steady gaze at Mount Rainier, or in naming the “pure / undoubtable being” of otherwise unnoticed and “unloved” forms of life, as in “Brother Ivy” or “Flowers of Sophia.” In Levertov’s practice of poetry and prophecy, history is not “made” simply by media-worthy world events, but by the recognition of happenings equally momentous in the natural world and in ordinary lives. This approach to history is shared by Czech poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz in The Witness of Poetry:
By experience I mean not only feeling the direct pressure of History, with a capital H, in the form of fire falling from the sky, invasions by foreign armies, or ruined cities. Historicity may reveal itself in a detail of architecture, in the shaping of a landscape, even in trees like those oaks close to my birthplace which remember my pagan ancestors. Yet only an awareness of the dangers menacing what we love allows us to sense the dimension of time and to feel in everything we see and touch the presence of past generations.
Because “prophecy” has been reduced so drastically to a synonym for “prediction,” our contemporary use of the word is associated most often with palm readings, horoscopes, or cultish speculations about the future. Even Levertov admits that “there was a time when I felt the association [between prophecy and poetry] was hyperbolic, because I was thinking too exclusively of the predictive sense of the word prophecy.” Over the years, she has been variously praised and accused by critics for her politically engaged poems, many of them apocalyptic in tone. More from a need to consider the poet’s vocation than from a defense of her own practice, Levertov is compelled to “give an account for the presence of the political in the literary” and, therefore, to account for the prophetic task of the poet in the world. In the process of doing so, in “Poetry, Prophecy, Survival,” Levertov not only revives the powerful Hebraic understanding of the prophet’s role, she also adds her own dimension. The basic model for prophets in Western culture, she believes, are in the Old Testament—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, for example,
and whether or not we take them to be gifted with foreknowledge ... they have without question other roles too: they warn of the effects and consequences of evildoing and foolishness; they upbraid the people for wrong or stupid behavior; and they take a powerful stand against corrupt and oppressive rulers.... Above all, I would add, the prophets provide words of witness.
A witness, in any context, is someone who provides personal, firsthand knowledge of something seen, heard, or experienced. A witness is awake, aware, and willing to give an account of the here and now. When that witness is a poet, according to Levertov, his or her words must be said “powerfully, with imagination and linguistic resourcefulness,” so that the utterance of the poet-prophet “transforms experience and moves the receiver to new attitudes.” It is not enough to warn; the poet’s words must also transform.
There is a strong connection between the inclusion of the word “witness” in Levertov’s definition of the poet-prophet and “Witnessing from Afar,” her title for the group of poems that includes “In the Land of Shinar” and fifteen other poems of political, environmental, and social concerns. Twenty-five years earlier, Levertov’s “witness” was undoubtedly “up close.” Along with her husband, Mitchell Goodman, she was an active demonstrator and rally leader in the peace movement during the Vietnam era, and she traveled to North Vietnam in 1972 on behalf of the Women’s Union and Writer’s Union with poets Muriel Rukeyser and Jane Hart. Upon returning, she spoke on many American campuses about what she saw, including the victims of napalm bombs and the remains of Vietnamese hospitals and villages that had been destroyed in U.S. attacks. But the so-called end of the war was hardly the end of Levertov’s engagement. In the years to follow, until her death in 1997, she participated in numerous antinuclear protests and freeze rallies, environmental causes, the El Salvador resistance (from which emerged her oratorio, “El Salvador: Requiem and Invocation”), and protests of the Gulf War. In the words of a recent poem, “when it was claimed / the war had ended, it had not ended.” Levertov believed that we are inexorably “living at war” until our imaginations of peace can truly be embodied. Peace is not merely the absence of war, in Levertov’s definition; it is the sure presence of a new world order.
By the time she published Evening Train in 1992, Levertov’s health kept her from the physically strenuous activity of witnessing “up close.” Her witness, however, was no less powerful in her later years—“from afar” being less a comment about her limitations (for her readers, anyway) than about the wider perspective afforded by age and experience. “In the Land of Shinar” is exemplary of those poems, more numerous in her later years, that reach “afar” in time and place for myths that timelessly serve her concerns. The Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel, built on the plain of Shinar, becomes a powerful image in Levertov’s imagination for the construction of our own destruction, which she viewed as inevitable if we do not correct our insatiable hunger for power over the earth and each other. The Old Testament story and Levertov’s poetic version of it both warn, clearly and urgently, of the consequences of human arrogance and of god-less projects to “make a name for ourselves” (in the words from Genesis 11:4).
In Levertov’s posthumous volume, This Great Unknowing (1999), editor Paul Lacey makes an apology for the fact that the book could not be organized any other way than chronologically, the order in which Levertov wrote her last poems. “Had Denise Levertov lived longer,” Lacey speculates, “they would have been organized, probably into subsections, according to thematic or other aesthetic principles.” In all but her earliest volumes, Lacey continues, “Levertov carefully arranged the order of poems so that both individual works and groups of poems could throw light on one another and themes and counterthemes could weave larger patterns.” In light of Levertov’s habit of composition, it is important to notice the placement and context of “In the Land of Shinar” in Evening Train. If the reader proceeds through the book in the order the poems appear, by the time he or she comes to the first line of “In the Land of Shinar” and its ominous shadow, the dangerous architectures designed by our “weight of will” already have names supplied by the fifteen poems that precede it in “Witnessing from Afar.” Military prowess, denial of death, erosion of language, distortions of the media, violence—all have mounted like the poem’s “searching / bird of prey.” Many images in those poems depend for their prophetic power on the reader’s knowledge of facts and concerns from the last half century. “The Reminder” uses the terminology of cancer, and “Mid-American Tragedy” employs vocabulary pertaining to AIDS. “Airshow Practice” uses the Blue Angels as a synecdoche to represent the whole of our violent idolatries. “Hoping” contains a dream image that all too closely resembles the devastation of a nuclear holocaust, and “The Youth Program” critiques the new generation of video games that have replaced simpler toys and
“Levertov’s work reveals that when the prophet is also a poet, language becomes both balancing rod and divining rod in the journey along those borderlands.”
outdoor play. Thus, by the time we reach “In the Land of Shinar,” the last poem in the group, the Old Testament story has become far more than an extended literary allusion to a time and place “afar” from our own. “We live in an unprecedented time,” Levertov asserted,
a time when as we all know the fate of the Earth itself lies in the balance as never before; when day by day powerful forces all over the globe are tipping that balance further towards extinction.
Therefore, she continues, the poet is obligated to answer the need for “direct images in our art that will waken, warn, stir their hearers to action; images that will both appall and empower.” The story’s power to warn and predict has been returned to our time, revitalized against the backdrop of contemporary diseases and idolatries that Denise Levertov witnessed, and transformed, into poetry.
No reading of a particular Levertov poem is complete without some attention to the way it reflects and refracts the energy of the poems that precede and follow it. The same can be said of her groups of poems. The tone of the poems in “Witnessing from Afar” is dark and sung in minor keys. They reveal the lamenting, raging, grieving dimension of the poet-prophet’s task. But they are neither the first word, nor the last. The darkening heights of human arrogance in “In the Land of Shinar” provide a dramatic counterpoint to the poems of “Lake Mountain Moon,” the opening section of Evening Train. In “Settling,” the book’s first poem, it is not the cycle of a shadow we follow, but that of a light, the “restless sun / forever rising and setting.” This semi-autobiographical poem is far removed from the inhospitable sounds and sights of Babel’s exhausting labor and the unnatural restlessness of its wheeling birds. Having just moved from the East Coast to Seattle, Levertov discovered:
I was welcomed here—clear gold
of late summer, of opening autumn,
the dawn eagle sunning himself on the highest tree ...
Her series of psalm-like praises for Mount Rainier and the landscape at its feet begins, in this poem, with quite a different relationship to “height”:
the mountain revealing herself unclouded, her snow
tinted apricot as she looked west ....
In another poem, the mountain’s mysterious comings and goings create its own kind of architecture—
a rhythm elusive as that of a sea-wave
higher than all the rest, riding to shore
flying its silver banners—
In “Open Secret,” the last poem of “Lake Mountain Moon,” Levertov’s reverence for Rainier culminates in a promise not to “visit” its heights:
This one is not, I think, to be known
by close scrutiny, by touch of foot or hand ....
Instead, she is willing to witness its beauty from afar:
This mountain’s power
lies in the open secret of its remote
apparition, silvery low-relief
coming and going moonlike at the horizon,
always loftier, lonelier, than I ever remember.
These acts of praise that open the book and continue, in poems such as “Steadfast,” “Range,” and “Arctic Spring,” embody Levertov’s conviction that the poet-prophet must impart hope as well as articulate dread. “Just to tell the Tate” of our engulfing shadow “and walk away isn’t enough,” she argues in “Poetry, Prophecy, Survival”:
a poetry of praise is equally necessary, that we not be overcome by despair but have the constant incentive of envisioned positive possibility—and because praise is an irresistible impulse of the soul.
There is no self-righteousness in the tone of these poems, no indication that Levertov believed she or her poetry has reached the perfect balance between praise and lament. Many poems from her last years are honest about the discomforts of being a poet in the eerie twilight of the late-twentieth century and of living suspended between doubt and belief in the world’s continuance. In ancient literature, it is not unusual to find a prophet sitting in the doorway to the city or the temple, poised on the edge where witnessing has the advantage of some distance. Regardless of time or place, says Levertov’s “Protestors,” it is not simply a matter of
Living on the rim
of the cauldron, disasters
witnessed but
not suffered in the flesh.
There is also a responsibility:
The choice: to speak
or not to speak.
We spoke.
The prophet inhabits the thin places between despair and delight, anger and wonder, destruction and creation, absence and presence. Levertov’s work reveals that when the prophet is also a poet, language becomes both balancing rod and divining rod in the journey along those borderlands. Evening Train’s final poem, “Suspended,” witnesses in intimate first person the challenge and tenuous assurance in being called to “sing and say” all that one can under the growing shadow:
I had grasped God’s garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
The ‘everlasting arms’ my sister loved to
remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummeted.
Source: Emily Archer, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.
Sources
Altieri, Charles, “Denise Levertov and the Limits of Aesthetic Presence,” Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism, edited by Albert Gelpi, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993, pp. 126-47.
Beck, Joyce Lorraine, “Denise Levertov’s Poetics and Oblique Prayers,” Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism, edited by Albert Gelpi, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993, pp. 268-87.
Boroff, Marie, “From ‘Recent Poetry,’” review of To Stay Alive (1972), Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism, edited by Albert Gelpi, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993, pp. 30-31.
Hallisey, Joan F., “Denise Levertov’s ‘Illustrious Ancestors’: The Hassidic Influence,” Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism, edited by Albert Gelpi, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993, pp. 260-67.
Levertov, Denise, “An English Field in the Nuclear Age,” Candles in Babylon, New York: New Directions, 1981, pp. 79-80.
Levertov, Denise, “A Testament and a Postcript, 1959-1973,” The Poet in the World, New York: New Directions, 1973, pp. 3-6.
Levertov, Denise, “Autobiographical Sketch,” New and Selected Essays, New York: New Directions, 1992, pp. 258-64.
Levertov, Denise, “Concurrence,” Candles in Babylon, New York: New Directions, 1981, p. 78.
Levertov, Denise, “Listening to Distant Guns,” Collected Earlier Poems, 1940-1960, New York: New Directions, 1979, p. 3.
Levertov, Denise, “On the Need for New Terms,” New and Selected Essays, New York: New Directions, 1992, pp. 74-77.
Levertov, Denise, “Origins of a Poem,” The Poet in the World, New York: New Directions, 1973, pp. 43-56.
Levertov, Denise, “Relearning the Alphabet,” Poems, 1968-1972, New York: New Directions, 1987, pp. 90-100.
Levertov, Denise, “The Whisper,” Poems, 1960-1967, New York: New Directions, 1983, p. 198.
Levertov, Denise, “Those Who Want Out,” A Door in the Hive, New York: New Directions, 1989, p. 44.
Lynch, Denise, “Denise Levertov in Pilgrimage,” Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism, edited by Albert Gelpi, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993, pp. 288-302.
Tassel, Janet, “Poetic Justice in El Salvador: Denise Levertov Brings Her Poetry and Politics to the Oratorio Form,” Conversations with Denise Levertov, edited by Jewel Spears Brooker, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998, pp. 123-34.
Wagner-Martin, Linda, “Levertov: Poetry and the Spiritual,” Critical Essays on Denise Levertov, edited by Linda Wagner-Martin, Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1991, pp. 196-204.
Zlotkowski, Edward, “In the Garden: A Place of Creation,” Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism, edited by Albert Gelpi, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993, pp. 303-20.
For Further Study
Brooker, Jewel Spears, ed., Conversations with Denise Levertov, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.
Despite some errors in its opening chronology. Jewel Spears Brooker has served Levertov readers and scholars well with this collection of interviews. They date from David Ossman’s interview in 1963 to Brooker’s own, in 1995, and find Levertov expressing quite a variety of concerns—artistic, political, spiritual, and environmental—all in her lively, generous idiom. A few interviews, such as the one conducted by Maureen Smith in 1973 for her Ph.D. dissertation, have not been published elsewhere and make a valuable contribution to Levertov scholarship.
Gelpi, Albert, ed., Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1993.
This collection of criticism and reviews represents discussions of Levertov’s work from her earliest volume, The Double Image (1946), to A Door in the Hive (1989). Editor Gelpi has organized the book into five parts—reviews, poetics, politics, gender, and religion—and has included a selected bibliography in the back to provide resources for further study. This volume is part of the “Under Discussion” series, which has a reputation for providing accessible, lucid criticism for students of contemporary poetry.
Levertov, Denise, New and Selected Essays, New York: New Directions, 1992.
Levertov selected the prose for this volume from some of her most important aesthetic statements, including her definition of “the poet in the world” and her description of the relationship between the journeys of art and faith. Also included are Levertov’s essays about William Carlos Williams, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Robert Duncan that provide insight into those who have influenced her. Other pieces underscore the depth of the interrelations she felt and practiced among poetry, politics, and love of nature, while still others reveal her close attention to poetic technique.
Little, Anne Colclough, and Susie Paul, eds., Denise Levertov: New Perspectives, West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill, 2000.
This collection of new essays is the first study to look at Levertov’s completed career. While some of the essays offer reminiscence by poets and critics—including Robert Creeley and Paul Lacey—who knew Levertov well, the volume also presents a variety of critical approaches by such writers as Christopher MacGowan, Victoria Frenkel Harris, and Harry Marten. A broad range of topics includes sexuality and gender, spirituality, influences on her work, her reinvigoration of the lyric tradition, and her legacy as a teacher.