Denise Levertov's "Illustrious Ancestors": The Hassidic Influence

Abstract

Denise Levertov's work is ordinarily seen in mainstream of American literature. She has been placed, on occasion, in Emersonian visionary tradition.1 In recent years, she has been clearly recognized as a poet who refuses to be silent in times of political and social crises.2 multi-cultural aspect of her work, however, has been, for most part, unexplored. Levertov speaks, with pride, of her multi-cultural background in her essay, The Sense of Pilgrimage, in Poet in World and in her memoir about her mother, in her recently published collection of prose works, Light Up Cave. In earlier reflection, poet makes reference to an early poem Illustrious Ancestors (Overland to Islands) which she believes reveals definite and peculiar destiny that she and her sister shared by their having among their ancestors two men who were living during same period (late 1700s and early 1800s) but in very different cultures, who had preoccupations which gave them a basic (had they known of one another and had [they] been able to cross barriers of language and religious prejudice).3 Denise and Olga felt that this kinship must be recognized in heaven or that somehow on earth it would be unified and redeemed through them. One of her paternal ancestors, Schneour Zalman, The Rav of Northern White Russia,4 was founder of Habad branch of Hasidim, and other, in her mother's ancestral line was Angell Jones of Mold, a tailor, teacher, and preacher to whom Daniel Owen, the Welsh Dickens, was apprenticed. shop of Angell Jones's son (the poet's great uncle) served as a kind of literary and intellectual salon in 1870s.5 Levertov believes that presence of figures like these in a person's imagination can help to create a kind of personal mythology and function as a source of confidence and inspiration for artist.6 Denise Levertov's most immediate Illustrious Ancestors, her parents, Paul and Beatrice Levertoff, were, themselves, storytellers, writers, and her mother, an artist, who encouraged their daughters to