Levertov and the Young Poets
REXROTH, KENNETH
Levertov and the Young Poets THE JACOB'S LADDER By Denise Levertov New Directions. 87 pp. $1.55. Reviewed by KENNETH REXROTH Author, "Bird in the Bush," "In Defense of the...
...It is not for nothing that her poems remind one of Constantin Brancusi or Juan Gris...
...This should certainly be near enough to mid-career, to ripeness, fruition, fulfillment of promise and all that sort of thing, to warrant well-considered judgment of her significance as a poet...
...It is curious that Denise Levertov should have started out as the most interesting of the younger British New Romantics, because this feminist vertigo, as Yvor Winters once pointed out in the case of H. D., is a kind of Romantic rhetoric, and Denise is far from being a Romantic today...
...I for one found it necessary to take a fireman's axe to their grasping little hands when they were clinging to my gunwales...
...We have no Academy in which to put away incurable enfants terribles...
...Think of what T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, James Joyce or even Gertrude Stein or Carl Sandburg had published by the time they were 38...
...Denise Levertov has simply outlived them...
...Time's winged chariot hurries near and all too soon the New American Poets of the Fifties will be one with the heroic generation of American modernism, the Proletarians, the Reactionaries and literature's 7,000 years...
...For it is the precise opposite of alienation—it is art as reconciliation, of man to himself, to his fellow man, and to the world...
...The Jacob's Ladder was published in Denise Levertov's 38th year...
...In Emily Dickinson, H. D., Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Muriel Rukeyser, we have had a continuous tradition, carried on in each literary generation, of rather more notable women poets than either England or France...
...Still, I continue to think her the most accomplished poet under 40 now writing (Robert Creeley is a close second...
...This is the whole secret of the ancient dispute about intensity...
...Maybe in 1982 someone will propose Allen Ginsberg for the Century Club...
...Like the poems of Williams or Pierre Reverdy, they are classical objects...
...In the meantime, nothing much seems to have happened at the other end of the time scale...
...I guess they are simply willing to ride to the pages of the Luce magazines on anybody's coat tails...
...What is intense in The Jacob's Ladder is the humanity—the intact person, endlessly complex, of the girl—and the immediacy of the object, whether it is lover, husband, child, parent, flower or winter night...
...But unlike the "cubist" poetry of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, they are illuminated by a kind of transcendence, the special luster of a sensibility that never sacrifices humaneness to intensity...
...Once I used to say "under 30," but now it is necessary to add a decade...
...In the period when Denise Levertov, Creeley, the Beats and the group in New York that includes Kenneth Koch, John Ashberry, Frank O'Hara and Barbara Guest were all coming up, the literary crust of custom stirred, bubbled and briefly erupted...
...They have been almost as incorrigibly young as Jean Cocteau...
...The stars simply do not reach down and strangle her...
...Of late, "poetess," like Negress or Jewess, has become a doubtful word, but in fact none of these women are poets who just happen to be female— they are all poetesses...
...It is a little hard to understand how the professional alienes ever managed to fasten on to Denise Levertov and include her in their organization...
...Sometimes I wonder if she finds this embarrassing, being a wife and mother and hardly knowing me...
...What is intense...
...Probably what is most significant about Denise Levertov is that she is the least poetess of them all, and more of a poet than most...
...And poetry like this will always outlive the cry of alienation...
...Empty intensity is, in the end, dishonest and predatory...
...A youthful bloom has lingered long on the reputations of the poets of the 1950s...
...There is no such thing as intensity in itself...
...She has plenty of femininity, and plenty of the intense sensibility considered specially feminine, but singularly little of the vertiginous, neurasthenic forms expected from woman poetry...
...In fact, she, more than anyone else, has led the redirection of American poetry from a provincial, academic romanticism to the main stream of world literature...
...Even Edna Milky could at least be called "notable...
...Now these people are all getting close to 40 and have themselves congealed into a new poetic Establishment...
...Meanwhile Denise Levertov has unquestionably arrived somewhere—but where...
...Reviewed by KENNETH REXROTH Author, "Bird in the Bush," "In Defense of the Earth," "Assays" Since way back during World War II, when she was a Land Girl in Essex, I have been writing about Denise Levertov...
Vol. 45 • July 1962 • No. 14
