Songs of Experience: Denise Levertov's Political Poetry

Abstract

Denise Levertov's large body of political poetry records the vicissitudes of a deeply ethical imagination grappling with the difficult public issues of the last twenty years. At forty-four, Levertov had published six volumes before her first Vietnam protest poems appeared in The Sorrow Dance (1967). The seven volumes since The Sorrow Dance all contain poems in response to contemporary political issues; in prose and at readings she is an outspoken activist.' Though she continues to write many nonpolitical poems and to gather politically topical poems in separate sections within volumes, Levertov's work since the late sixties is infused with the reciprocal beliefs that only revolution can now save that earthly life, that miracle of being, which poetry conserves and celebrates2 and that by its very nature, poetry itself is intrinsically revolutionary.3 The effort to fuse poetry and revolution is more vexed, however, than Levertov suggests in her numerous ars poetica. Her evolution