Pilgrimage of a Poet

...Imperfection is a sign of vitality, and if I have sought and found a flaw in The Poet in the World, let me present it as the reassuring blemish in an otherwise excellent and fascinating book, one of the best books a poet has written about the poet's craft...

...But there are also essays on political activism about which, I confess, my feelings are more ambivalent...

...It was at the beginning of 1947, during one of the worst postwar European winters...

...What Denise Levertov herself identifies as one of the great differences between her English and her American poetry is that through emigration she learned "to engage my capacities as a poet in the crude substance of dailiness...

...My wife and I had gone over to Holland to visit with a Dutch anarchist, a man of vast and generous heart named Jerry Lavies, long since dead...

...And if political shrewdness is not in accord with his nature, then the poet should be content to make his personal action consistent with his statements and refrain from trying to persuade others through vague and inconclusive rhetoric...

...A Qaddafi revolution...

...I felt it might offer the continuity I was sure existed between the two differing poets or, rather, between the two differing kinds of poetry...

...The lakes were frozen and at night the ice cracked with great cannon shots...

...I left England the next year for western Canada, and did not see Denise again until 1963, when she came to Vancouver for a poetry conference...

...They represent in addition the wisdom of half a lifetime of writing poetry, and what impresses one constantly is her interest in the practicalities of creation, not to mention her sensible avoidance of faddish cults...

...doubtless it must be learned again...

...A Mao revolution...

...For example, she cuts through the cant about poetry being dependent on the physical voice to point out that some poets simply have terrible voices, and that in any case a poem is controlled by "the rhythm of the inner voice...

...A Gandhi revolution...

...Denise was staying there too...

...The reasons for my interest also include the occasionally narrowing parallel between Denise Levertov's history and my own...

...All this is by way of explaining why I have anticipated with exceptional interest Denise Levertov's first prose book...

...One passage in our acquaintance f remember with special vividness...

...Teaching, she says, "has opened my life...

...The more I read, in fact, the more I became convinced that Denise Levertov has remained the romantic she was in her early poems: She retains the attitude toward creativity that in her English period was most amply discussed and exemplified by the British poet and critic Herbert Read, whom she had known in her schooldays and with whom she shared so much in terms of sensibility...

...Worlds divide them...

...personally and as writers, influenced her in her formative years...

...I was not disappointed...

...towards people, towards a political and social understanding...

...In doing this, she demonstrates that her changes in technique and diction did not mean a fundamental change in attitude...

...Her first book, The Double Image, appeared in 1946, and projected a sensibility conditioned by the fortunate conjunction of Welsh and Jewish ancestries...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Editor, "Canadian Literature": author, "Dawn and the Darkest Hour" I knew Denise Levertov and her work 30 years ago, long before most of the people for whom she is now an important contemporary poet...

...The latter would certainly not have been anything new...

...Far Eastern connoisseurs avoid the pot that has no flaw...

...During the '60s she became an activist, and her actions certainly proved her sincerity...

...When I read the excellent passages in The Poet in the World on the difference between organic poetry and free verse (organic poetry never loses sight of the poem as a whole), when I encountered observations like "Form is never more than a revelation of content," and "There is a poetry that in thought and in feeling and in perception seeks the forms peculiar to these experiences," I heard the voice of a true romantic...

...One agrees, totally...

...It all depends on the word's meaning, and we never know what it means to Denise Levertov...

...Yet the continuity is there...

...It was likewise a matter of getting involved through teaching in the lives of the young...

...there are no pieces from before 1959, none of the reviews are of the English poets with whom Denise Levertov consorted in the '40s, and little mention is made of those who...

...Our initial meeting, so far as my memory holds, came early in 1945 when she was publishing poems in such London little magazines of the time as Now, where I was the editor...

...I was fascinated, because this was exactly the landscape I had imagined in a series of recurrent childhood dreams...

...But Levertov's views are derived only in part from Read and from her other neo-Romantic associates...

...I noted rather sadly, too...

...This was not merely a question of relating poetry more closely to colloquial speech or to the minutiae of an ordinary woman's life...

...I remember publishing in 1947 a fine Levertov poem on "Folding a Shirt...

...In the world of politics the wings that are the poet's strength become as clumsy and inept as those of Baudelaire's albatross...

...The Poet in the World is a collection of occasional documents—essays and notes on the making of poems, on the poet as activist, on the poet as teacher—combined with a few book reviews of admired ooets...

...But there is a concurrent obligation for the words to be precise and for the facts to be sought and stated completely...

...During those weeks I had long talks, and long silences, with Denise Levertov...

...The context is entirely American...

...What intrigues me about her career is her transformation from an English neo-Romantic in the 1940s to a poet in the American grain in the 1960s and '70s...

...that the name of Read never appears in her book...

...She says: "The obligation of the writer is to take personal and active responsibility for his words, whatever they are, and to acknowledge their potential influence on the lives of others...

...But I was aware of the extended silence she had gone through on reaching North America, followed by her emergence as—apparently—a different kind of poet...

...The house was near Gouda in a curious setting—a kind of island between big artificial lakes crossed by dykes...

...She talks of the need for revolution, but at no time tells us how the revolution will be achieved, at what cost, or what its aim or nature will be...

...A Lenin revolution...

...Aware—and envious...

...Later in the same year she married Mitch Goodman, and one day in 1948 before their departure for New York the three of us gathered in a now-vanished London pub on Red Lion Street for a farewell drink...

...A Bakunin revolution...

...it has achieved the perfection that is death...

...What disappoints one in her writing on this subject, however, is that it rarely goes beyond emotional generalities...

...at least in these essays she is never in the slightest degree explicit...

...In the '40s, when I was an anarchist activist, Denise Levertov was perhaps loyal in sentiment to the cause, although not herself in any way active...

...This lesson the poets of the '30s learned, painfully...

...possibly because I am more than half Welsh myself, I found her work particularly sympathetic...

...For I had experienced a similar silence on shifting my continents, and had emerged from it not a changed poet but a prose writer...

...It appears explicitly in a paper entitled "The Sense of Pilgrimage," in which Levertov identifies the basic symbol of her whole poetic career as the concept of life as a pilgrimage, and in which she brings her early neo-Romantic poetry into relationship with her later American verse...

...She travels to North Vietnam and gushes uncritically, as if there were not political prisoners in Hanoi as well as in Saigon...

...Indeed, there are essays in The Poet in the World on the teaching experience that anyone who has combined teaching with writing will find familiar and sensible...