Denise Levertov was well on her way to becoming a pleasant, minor British neo-romantic poet when an American had to come along, marry and transport her to San Francisco, and add to her already complex Judaeo-Celtic heritage the insalubrious atmosphere of the Bay Area's beatnikism: Mishna and Mabinogion, if you will; but then on to Zen and mishmash? So now, in her The Jacob's Ladder, behold verse like, "I hear / the tide turning. Last / eager wave over- / taken and pulled back / by moon-ache. The great knots / of moon-awake energy / far out."… On the whole, the poems in The Jacob's Ladder can be fair to middling, like the title poem,… or pretentious and lumpish, like "In Memory of Boris Pasternak."… Let it be noted also that Miss Levertov's free verse is often uncompelling in its movement, and frequently as arbitrary and ostentatious in its line breaks as William Carlos Williams's at its worst. "She is the most subtly skillful poet of her generation," Kenneth Rexroth informs us, and adds, "the most profound, the most modest, the most moving." The only way I can make sense of these four superlatives is to assume that the first ("most skillful") is used to keep the other three well hidden. (pp. 241-42)