Denise Levertov

This study is concerned with both Denise Levertov's social consciousness as manifested in her earliest poetry and with her growth as a "poet in the world." Early in her career, Levertov was highly praised as a lyric poet of considerable sensitivity whose poems were succinct (at times mystical, at times sensuous) and whose technical gifts were impeccable. During the height of her emergence as a political dissident during the Vietnam War, the "Orphic" poet was seen as having traded aesthetics for polemics. Audrey T. Rodgers works to disprove the assumption that art and politics are mutually…