Levertov, Denise 1923–

Ms Levertov is a prize-winning British-American poet of Welsh and Jewish parentage, sometimes associated with the Black Mountain or "projectivist" poets. Her principal poetic concern has always been the relationship of form and content; her search for an "organic" poetry, a "manifestation of form sense" discovered by the poet in all things, has led her to endorse Hopkins' "inscape concept." Her graceful, powerful, and irreducible poems, "obstinately precise," are among the finest in contemporary American literature. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 1-4, rev. ed.)

[It] is not by heaving her up onto the double standard of penis envy that we can see this poet plain. Beyond her monostrophic discipleship to the Boys, and the relic imagism that labels her still one of the Girls, Denise Levertov has a further—and happily, decisive—range of experience which she has committed to the language, that makes her poetry...

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