mundane until their unfamiliarity and otherworldliness suddenly strike us. Her imaginative gaze feasts on the small objects we usually treat as insignificant appendages to our lives, or pauses with affectionate interest on the seemingly trivial activities in which we spend so much of those lives. Thus she engages very naturally in a persistent investigation of the events of her own life—inner and outer—in the language of her own time and place, and completes that investigation in the forms emerging from what she discovers as it is translated into words….

[To] find any metaphysical revelation in Miss Levertov's art we must enter the precincts of the poet's own existence, for she justifies her art through that existence, as well as her existence through her artistic perception.

Miss Levertov's primary intention as a poet has not been the statement of visionary experiences but rather the dogged probing of all the routine business of life in search of what she calls "the authentic" in its rhythms and its details….

The quotidian reality we ignore or try to escape, Denise Levertov revels in, carves and hammers into lyric poems of precise beauty. As celebrations and rituals lifted from the midst of contemporary life in its actual concreteness, her poems are unsurpassed; they open to us aspects of object and situation that but for them we should never have known.

Ralph J. Mills, Jr., "Denise Levertov: The Poetry of the Immediate," in Poets in Progress, edited by Edward Hungerford, Northwestern University Press, 2nd edition, 1967.

That Levertov has become a political activist doesn't seem to have damaged her gift of rhythm or her skill of fusing form and content, image and motion. My hunch is that the complete poet goes inward and outward at once, and finds the two meeting in a tension which, fully apprehended, makes a new creative energy.

Todd Gitlin, "The Return of Political Poetry," in Commonweal (reprinted by permission of Commonweal Publishing Co., Inc.), July 23, 1971, pp. 375-80.

Denise Levertov's style is characterized by its low visibility. Her poems are so carefully wrought that the workmanship goes by unnoticed. They seem like speech, heightened and purified. Although her poems are modernistic enough to satisfy any avant-garde editor of the Twenties, they are certainly never obscure, never seem to be doing anything but communicating with presentational immediacy.

Kenneth Rexroth, in his American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (copyright © 1971 Herder and Herder, Inc.; used by permission of the publisher, The Seabury Press, New York), Herder, 1971, p. 164.

As a document, the book [To Stay Alive] is heavy with fact: names are named, places and dates given, accusations made, praise bestowed. Its major fault—in the geological sense of a fracture-line between opposed forces—results from the attempt to absorb these materials into a specifically poetic dramatization. Levertov's poetic sensibility is deeply informed by the classical English tradition (phrases from Keats, Hopkins, and Swinburne float in italics on the page). The time-honored impulse to celebrate, to wonder, to sing is basic in her, and this impulse is, literally, disturbed by the knowledge that an unassimilable evil exists which must be hated and which must be fought on the level of action. Poetic forms are repeatedly laid aside, as if felt inadequate for the rendering of actual life. Pages of the book are devoted to "real" excerpts, in prose, from pamphlets, postcards, letters, simulated or actual newspaper items, and a page from The Instant News published in Berkeley at the time of the People's Park confrontations (in which Levertov was a participant), telling "What People Can Do." At times the effect is one of collage; the reader has an irritating sense of being made to switch back and forth between poetic and moral response….

Elsewhere, the resources of traditional rhetoric are eloquently marshaled in the attempt to bring home the unspeakable…. The celebration is Shakespearian, reassuring; the indignation is as lofty as it is vain…. It is as a human portrait, not as a work of imaginative transfiguration, that this book remains with us, in delicate and anguished echo. Perhaps this is as its author would wish.

Marie Borroff, in The Yale Review (© 1972 by Yale University; reprinted by permission of the editors), Autumn, 1972, pp. 81-3.

It is distressing to report that … Denise Levertov's new book, To Stay Alive, contains a quantity of bad confessional verse. Her anti-Vietnam War poems, written in casual diary form, sound rather like a versified New York Review of Books—the same righteous indignation, the same uncompromising moral zeal and self-important tone. It is difficult to believe that the poet who, as one of the most promising heirs of William Carlos Williams, wrote "The world is/not with us enough/O taste and see," should now resort to the flat abstractions, the facile polemics, and the careless rhythms of To Stay Alive….

But, poetry aside, To Stay Alive is not even particularly good rhetoric: the speaker herself seems too implausibly innocent of the crimes that "fevered Amerika" is committing. One would think that never before in history had any country waged an unjust war, that all Vietnamese are saints, all American politicians villains.

Marjorie G. Perloff, "Poetry Chronicle: 1970–71," in Contemporary Literature (© 1973 by the Regents of the University of Wisconsin), Vol. 14, No. 1, Winter, 1973, pp. 97-131.