A Poetic Re-Telling of the Orphic Myth: A Political Study of Denise Levertov’s “A Tree Telling of Orpheus”

Abstract

Modern poets, such as William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Rainer Maria Rilke, have used classical myths in a modern context to explain modern issues and to feed up from the rich material of Greek and Roman mythology. Denise Levertov takes the right of all authors to knock into the heart of Western and classical traditions and to reinvent them for her time. Though Levertov’s early poetry expresses her appreciation of nature and of the epiphanic moments of daily life, during the late 1960s her work became progressively concerned with political and social issues. She conveys her offense in poems of distress over Vietnam and of commonality with the alternative culture that opposed the war. Levertov insists upon the connectedness of public and private spheres. The Vietnam War was a major preoccupation of the youth movement of the 1960s, whose protests against it caused the occasional disruption of Levertov’s “A Tree Telling of Orpheus.” This paper aims to retell the Greek myth of Orpheus and his famous song of perception and revitalization, which includes all the aspects of life and rebirth, with a modern revision. Levertov compares the awaking trees captivated by Orpheus’s song along with the awakening of the revolutionary consciousness that lays at the heart of` the countercultural movement of the 1960s.