[Rexroth was an influential American poet, critic, editor, and translator, who was active in the San Francisco-based literary revival of the 1940s and 1950s. With the following review, originally published in Poetry in November, 1957, Rexroth became an early proponent of the work Levertov produced after coming to the United States, finding it superior to the poetry of most of her contemporaries.]

In my opinion Denise Levertov is incomparably the best poet of what is getting to be known as the new avantgarde. This may sound to some, committed to the gospel of the professor poets—the first commandment of whose decalogue of reaction is: "The age of experiment is over"—like saying that she is very much better than her associates, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Cid Corman, Chris Berjknes, Gil Orlovitz and others who published in Origin and the Black Mountain Review. I don't believe these are bad poets—in fact, I think they are the best of their generation and the only hope for American poetry. It is just that Denise Levertov has several things they haven't got, at least yet.

In the first place, she is more civilized. One thing she has which they lack conspicuously is what Ezra Pound calls culture (which he himself is utterly without). She is securely humane in a way very few people are any more. This is not because she is English, of Welsh and Jewish parentage, although the fact that her father was a learned rabbi, a leading authority on the Kabbalah, who became an Anglo-Catholic priest, may have helped. She seems to have grown up in a household full of mildly Bohemian scholarship, freewheeling learning of the type Theodore Gaster made well known in his reminiscences of his own father (Rabbi Gaster and Paul Levertov were friends). Certainly this is a humanism older than the Renaissance, so well founded that it penetrates every bit of life. This is far from the humanism of Sigismondo Malatesta or even Henry Luce—it is more like Lao-tse. If it is really absorbed and manifest in an individual it becomes that rare thing, wisdom. I don't need to labor the point that there exist practically no wise poets nowadays and few for the last two hundred years.

This means that Denise Levertov knows more than her colleagues, far more than most; she is far sounder than Olson, whose learning suffers from the same sort of Frobenius-Lost Atlantis provincial oddity as Pound's. Many of them know practically nothing, not even French and algebra. Because it is humane, her knowledge is the result of doing what came naturally. She may have read Donne from her father's library at the age of ten—perhaps, like the Bible, for the dirty words. That is the way to read Donne. Cultured people do not discover him when they go to Harvard and use him to intimidate the yokels back home in St. Louis. This means too that she has an almost perfect ear. Reading her, especially hearing her read aloud, you feel she must have literally absorbed the rhythms of great poetry with her mother's milk. It is all so natural and so utterly removed from English 7649328 A—Forms and Techniques of English Verse (4 credits).

Nothing shows this better than the actual evolution of idiom and tone. During the years of the Second World War, Denise Levertov came up as one of the best and one of the most individual of the young English Neo-Romantics. Comfort, Woodcock, Gascoyne, Gardiner, Tambimuttu, Read, the whole "leadership" of the "movement" were quick to recognize her as something very special indeed. She was naturally "romantic." She didnz't have to believe in it or belong to it as a movement. She was built that way. I said of her then that "in poets like Denise Levertov this tendency (a sort of autumnal-evening Wienerwald melancholy) reaches its height in slow, pulsating rhythms, romantic melancholy and indefinable nostalgia. Once these qualities would have been considered blemishes. Today they are outstanding virtues. For the first time, Schäwrmerei enters English verse." The only thing wrong with this statement in those days was that there weren't any "poets like Denise Levertov." She was unique. None followed her. The next crop, represented, say, by Heath-Stubbs, seem like muggy little Böcklins cut out of cardboard in comparison. It was as though for a moment in the October moonlight a girl's voice sang faintly across the Danube, "Knowest thou a land where the pomegranate blooms…." And then she gave it all up. "Hospital nurse, land girl, charwoman, children's nurse, companion to an alcoholic …" Hitchhiking over France the year after the Second World War ended, she married a GI and came to the States. "She'll probably end up a professor's wife," said a friend in London in 1949, "pushing a pram in a supermarket."

Denise turned out to be made of tougher stuff … and the GI, himself a writer, was on the side of the angels. At first she fell under the influence of the Southern Colonels and the Country Gentlemen. It didn't last long. We were all horrified. "So and so is a lot like our Empson," said she to me. Said I to her, "'Ceptin' that he never seen a book until he went to school and his folks still got cotton seeds in they hair. And besides, you are a leader of the very generation of revolt against the impostures of Empson, Richards, Eliot and their sycophants." She allowed as how that was true. But nobody "influenced" her to turn away, pretty quick, from the smoking dogs and bicycling seals of the American academicians. It was her own good sense, the good sense of bona fide tradition and an infallible ear. W. H. Auden has spent years in America and never learned to use a single phrase of American slang without sounding like a British music-hall Yank comic and his verse has remained as British, as specifically "school," as Matthew Arnold. In no time at all Denise came to talk like a mildly internationalized young woman living in New York but alive to all the life of speech in the country. Her verse changed abruptly. It would be easy to say that it came under the influence of William Carlos Williams. It would be more true to say that it moved into the mainstream of twentieth-century poetry. She writes like Williams, a little, but she also writes "like" Salmon, or Reverdy, or Char—or Machado, or Louis Zukofsky, or Parker Tyler, or Patchen, or the early Lowenfels, or me. After all, as Shakespeare said, we are all civilized men. I think Miss Levertov is a better poet than Salmon, as Williams is a better poet than Reverdy. If all her work of the past ten years were collected, I suspect she would show as the equal of Char and as superior to all but a handful of American poets born in this century. Certainly she is better than any post-Second World War French poet—than Frenaud, or Cadou, or Beck-er, or Rousselot. Her only rival among the younger women in England is a poet once described by an older colleague as writing like an exquisitely well-bred lady's maid, and who hasn't been up to her early snuff in many years. The only trouble with Here and Now is that it is much too small a collection and it is a collection of her easiest verse.

The fact that Denise Levertov has had to wait so long for publication and now is able to publish so little is a shame to American publishers, who year after year put out the most meretricious, pompous, academic nonsense, which gets meretricious, pompous, academic reviews in the literary quarterlies—and wins countless millions in Fellowships, Scholarships, Consultantships and Visiting Poetships. The official position is that people like Denise Levertov do not exist. Officialdom to the contrary, they very much do, and they will out-exist the jerry-built reputations of the Vaticide Review by many, many long years. Nothing could be harder, more irreducible, than these poems. Like the eggs and birds of Brancusi, they are bezoars shaped and polished in the vitals of a powerful creative sensibility. No seminar will break their creative wholeness, their presentational immediacy. No snobbery will dissolve their intense personal integrity. However irrefrangible as objects of art, it is that, their personalism, that makes them such perfect poetic utterances. Denise may never have pushed a pram in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, supermarket, but these are woman poems, wife poems, mother poems, differing only in quality of sensibility from thousands of other expressions of universal experience. Experience is not dodged, the sensibility is not defrauded—with any ambiguity, of seven types or seventy. One meets the other head on, without compromise. This, I was taught in school, many years ago in a better day, is what makes great poetry great. And the rhythms. The Schwärmerei and lassitude are gone. Their place has been taken by a kind of animal grace of the word, a pulse like the footfalls of a cat or the wingbeats of a gull. It is the intense aliveness of an alert domestic love—the wedding of form and content in poems which themselves celebrate a kind of perpetual wedding of two persons always realized as two responsible sensibilities. What more do you want of poetry? You can't ask much more. Certainly you seldom get a tenth as much.