[Mills is an American educator and critic whose books include Theodore Roethke (1963) and Richard Eberhart (1966). In this essay, originally published in Mills's Contemporary American Poetry in 1965, he analyzes Levertov's poetry as it relates to that of William Carlos Williams and discusses her use of "personal observation and knowledge."]

American poetry at the present time sustains two extremes, with a wide range of practice in between in which the best—as well as the most truly advanced—writing is usually done. One extreme is represented by the academic poets. The term does not necessarily apply to all poets who happen to teach in universities for their living, but denotes those writers whose materials are often selected from the history of literature and culture, and whose methods are dictated by critical theories of what poetry ought to be. At the opposite extreme, the Hip writers mistake the exhibition of hysteria and the release of invective, unhindered by the requirements of craft, for poetry. Whitman and Rimbaud, the "true gods" the Hip writers claim for their masters, had both the genius and the strength to navigate the rapids of emotion and vision in which these self-styled successors capsize and drown.

At the same moment—around 1957—that such figures as Ginsberg and Kerouac began to make news, a number of other, previously little-known, poets also published their own books and caused a less sensational but more worthy stir. Some of them may even have been loosely associated in the minds of their audience with the Hip writers next to whom they were occasionally printed; but there is little resemblance except in their mutual rejection of the ruling literary and critical modes. And these poets differ greatly among one another as well. All of them, however—and include here poets such as Robert Creeley, Paul Carroll, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Gary Snyder, David Ignatow, Brother Antoninus, Galway Kinnell, and John Logan, in addition to Denise Levertov—aim at an expression of the most personal kind of experience, an authentic statement about themselves, what they see and know, suffer and love; their responses to the things, relationships, and heightened instants of their lives. The tendencies of these poets lead them to the repudiation of Eliot's belief in an "objective correlative" that screens the artist from his work and maintains the privacy of his life as an individual. The idea of masks that explains so much modern poetry of the post-Symbolist generation has no value for these younger poets, who really walk naked, as Yeats said poets should….

[Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and David Ignatow] have steeped themselves for a long time in that tradition of modern writing whose pioneers are William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and H. D.

Among her fellow-poets in this tradition, Denise Levertov stands out as one whose art, fresh and compelling, convinces us of her genuine rapport with the reality she presents as its core. Her poetry is frequently a tour through the familiar and the 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. Miss Levertov shares the spirit of Martin Buber, for she always says "thou" to the persons, occasions, and objects she encounters; that is her imagination's essential humanizing gesture toward every aspect of existence.

As I have already indicated, Miss Levertov, along with a variety of other poets, departs sharply from the poetic and critical line passing down through Yeats, Eliot, Auden, and the critics who have developed aesthetic views from their initiative. In the introduction to his anthology Contemporary American Poetry, Donald Hall offers a good summary description of qualities emphasized by the poets working in the opposing tradition, with its foundation in the example of William Carlos Williams. "This poetry," Hall tells us, "is no mere restriction of one's vocabulary. It wants to use the language with the intimacy acquired in unrehearsed unliterary speech. But it has other characteristics which are not linguistic. It is a poetry of experiences more than of ideas. The experience is presented often without comment, and the words of the description must supply the emotion which the experience generates, without generalization or summary."

In allying herself with this movement, Miss Levertov had to grapple with prevailing literary modes and, finally, to discard them. A struggle of this sort, the purpose of which is to open a way for poetic development, normally makes or breaks a writer—that is, if he or she dares to undertake it, as many do not—and it is a real sign of Miss Levertov's abilities that she has returned victorious. But the effort to win a voice of one's own amounts to nothing or becomes artificial unless it has been prompted by the conditions of human experience itself, by all that is cast into the poet's field of vision in the course of living. Poetry, if it will earn its name, must never begin with experience at second hand, but with a steady eye on what surrounds us everywhere. As the French philosopher Jacques Maritain says in his Art and Scholasticism, "Our art does not derive from itself alone what it imparts to things; it spreads over them a secret which it first discovered in them, in their invisible substance or in their endless exchanges and correspondences." Miss Levertov has learned this lesson well, and it is identical to the one her art teaches us. The conclusion of her "Note on the Work of the Imagination" (New Directions 17, edited by James Laughlin) adds to the quotation from Maritain a consideration of this spiritual faculty which makes the poetic object possible; she writes, "What joy to be reminded … that the Imagination does not arise from the environment but has the power to create it!"

Some poets make their published poems the battle-ground for style and individuality, and the reader can witness the spectacle, and its success or failure. In Denise Levertov there is an unseen conflict which occurred somewhere in the eleven-year span between her first book, The Double Image (1946), published in England before she came to the United States, and her next, Here and Now (1957), issued by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco. Kenneth Rexroth, who anthologized her work some years ago in his New British Poets, placed her then as one of the most promising neo-romantics of the war period; but his later statements about her writing, collected in Assays (1961), indicate that he believes—as I do—Miss Levertov's full powers as a poet began to unleash themselves only after she had been in America awhile and, as Rexroth says, had come "to talk like a mildly internationalized young woman living in New York but alive to all the life of speech in the country."

The poems included in The Double Image give evidence of a true poetic gift in their author, though they are not marked with those characteristics of thought and rhythm and speech that would insure them as her handiwork, and hers alone. I don't mean that the poems are imitations; on the other hand, they seem to partake of a general mood in English poetry of the time, owing, no doubt, to the war. Here is world-weariness, disenchantment, a flirtatiousness with death and the twilight regions of the spirit. Somehow a vein of uncertainty runs through these pieces, as if the poet almost suspected herself in what she was doing. I am sure, however, that I could never gain such an impression if Miss Levertov had published only that single volume or if she had continued in her initial style. She served her poetic apprenticeship in works suffused with vague emotion, filled with whispers of morality and unrest, the damp vegetation of England, and murmurs of perishable love. I will quote just a few lines from one of these early poems, "Five Aspects of Fear," before approaching her more central productions:

In fear of floods, long quenched, waves fallen,
shattered mirrors darken with old cries;
where no shot sounds the frightened birds go flying
over heights of autumn soft as honey:
each country left is full of our own ghosts
in fear of floods quenched, waves fallen.
Rags of childhood flutter in the woods
and each deserted post has sentinels;
bright eyes in wells watch for the sun's assassin:
the regions bereft of our desires are haunted,
rags of childhood flutter in the woods.

Something of the Georgians lingers on in this passage with its rural withdrawal from contemporary affairs, but the strongest and most obvious pull is toward Surrealism, which had crossed the Channel in the 1930's and was still a strong influence during the war. Miss Levertov tries, by means of dreamlike associations and indefiniteness of imagery, to articulate as nearly as possible the purity of her emotions, unsoiled by the concrete or the particular. That vagueness is far removed from what we have come to know as the essential poet in her, the poet whose sleeves are rolled and who wrestles up to her elbows in the dust of a common world. In this poem the effects are atmospheric; the words, I believe, are supposed to bear a cumulative weight of feeling apart from any denotation. How different from the present Denise Levertov, who senses her materials as a Giacometti or a David Hare senses the materials of his sculpture. Her "Pleasures," as she calls them in the title of a later poem, are now quite altered:

The reader will not be wrong, I think, if he sees in this poem, behind its fascination with the beauty of small objects and concealed things, an allegorical statement of the poet's own concern with material reality. In forcing tangible things to disclose their truths and felicities, she urges human reality to yield some of its secrets—and its covert analogies and predilections too.

The change that takes place between her first and second books—in a decade that saw Miss Levertov leave England, travel in Europe, meet the American novelist Mitchell Goodman, marry him, and settle in this country—is remarkable and must have demanded no less than a complete renovation of her poetic values. But this revolution of the heart, the head, the senses, how worthwhile it all was! She was compelled to start from scratch, and that meant for Miss Levertov a confrontation of the happenings of her life. What she so shrewdly observed was that the ordinary is extraordinarily unusual:

Of course, as Kenneth Rexroth further noted, Miss Levertov came under novel influences in America that were quite unlike any English ones. He names as a chief influence the poet we have already mentioned, the writer whose lessons she must have learned well, though without sacrificing her own intentions and capacities. That poet is the late William Carlos Williams. It is likely that she also learned from Rexroth's own poetry and from the Imagists; in her moving tribute to H. D. entitled "Summer 1961," she records some of her debts to Williams, Pound, and H. D.:

They have told us
the road leads to the sea,
and given

the language into our hands.

Perhaps if we look at a brief but fairly representative poem by Williams to remind ourselves of certain qualities in his work we will be able to determine, by comparison with Miss Levertov's "Laying the Dust" above, some of their similarities. Williams' poem is called "Between Walls":

the back wings
of the

hospital where
nothing

will grow lie
cinders

in which shine
the broken

pieces of a green
bottle

Clearly, this poem has little relation to the kind of poetry in the ascendency during the first half of the twentieth century; the poetry of the French Symbolists has had no bearing on what we read in these lines. Again, if we try to apply the sort of exegesis to Williams' poetry—or to Miss Levertov's, for that matter—that is used on Eliot's or Rilke's or Valéry's, we shall miss the point and look foolish. Ingenious explication is beside the point here and will bury the meaning of both poems; we should do better to contemplate them as we would a painting. Williams' attraction to the disjecta membra of the physical world, particularly of the modern urban setting, set a firm precedent for Miss Levertov's own poetic venture. We should not forget, either, Williams' insistence that the moral responsibility of the American poet lies in using his native tongue "to represent what his mind perceives directly about him," because this endeavor is, to a degree, Miss Levertov's. Yet there is also a gradual inward turning in her latest poetry and an increasing preoccupation with parable, dream, and interior illumination that are foreign to Williams' imagination.

Williams was for years a champion of younger writers in the United States and, further, was a stalwart foe of the post-Symbolist literature of Yeats and Eliot, as well as an opponent of what he thought was an outworn tradition of English verse forms and meters. It is hardly by accident, then, that young poets, in search of a way past the official poetic idiom, looked to Williams' writings and his viewpoint for guidance. The rejection of conventional for organic form; the repudiation of established metrical patterns in favor of what Williams called "the variable foot"; the return to the spoken language, the American spoken language—these are some of the most prominent results of the senior poet's influence. These younger poets likewise avoid in general the habit of making their work a repository of intellectual history, learning, and fragments of the European cultural heritage. I should like to call the poetry of Miss Levertov, and that of a number of her contemporaries, "poetry of the immediate."

My term requires some explanation. I do not mean by "the immediate" an art without craftsmanship, an art that fixes on the disorder of sheer impulse or emotional notation. Miss Levertov has never allowed her poetry to become even slightly vulnerable to that kind of charge—a glance at any one of her poems will prove it. Moreover, we need only cite the comment she supplies for Donald Allen's anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960, where there is no mistaking her distaste for sloppy composition: "I long for poems," she writes, "of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist." Poetry must not be a shapeless replica of external things but an organically formed transfiguration of them in which the transfiguration, rather than poetic convention, dictates the form. What I call "the immediate," then, signifies the complex of relationships existing between the poet and the elements that are close at hand in her personal experience. The things, the happenings, the thoughts and dreams that are subjective events in themselves—everything that falls within the circumference of the poet's life as an individual—become the matter of poetry. The aumor's private circumstance is explored, its potentialities drawn out; but however far her speculations lead her, Miss Levertov never oversteps that circumference. Instead, she creates from within herself an attitude with which to face her environment, as in her poem "Something to Wear":

To sit and sit like the cat
and think my thoughts through—
that might be a deep pleasure:

to learn what news
persistence might discover,
and like a woman knitting

make something from the
skein unwinding, unwinding,
something I could wear

or something you could wear
when at length I rose to meet you
outside the quiet sitting-room

(the room of thinking and knitting
the room of cats and women)
among the clamor of

cars and people,
the stars drumming and poems
leaping from shattered windows.

This poem grows around the mind's self-reflective activity. While poems about poetry, the act of composition, or the mind contemplating its own powers and processes are common in the literary history of the past 170 years—Mallarmé and Wallace Stevens, for example, expended much of their artistic energy on these themes—Denise Levertov treats such matters in a more personal, autobiographical way than most previous poets have done. Mallarmé, in his famous sonnet "La vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui," depicts the poet's failure of imagination through the remote but lovely symbolic image of a swan trapped in ice and earthbound:

But however acutely the poet has felt the anguish of impotence in his art, he has removed those feelings from the sphere of his own life and incorporated them into the symbolic universe of his poetry. Stevens is less divided; indeed, his notebooks indicate that he wished to have his theory of the imagination become a cosmic view that could be shared by all men. Nonetheless, Stevens' poetry is generally impersonal and almost totally divorced from the important details of his existence as a man. Miss Levertov does not recognize such separations and refuses to hide her life from her imagination. Yet she may have learned from Stevens—as well as from her own thoughts or from other poets' work—that poetry can be involved in the mind's activity as an individual goes about his daily business of registering and interpreting and responding to surrounding reality. The poem "Something to Wear" describes in part the preparations the mind or self makes to encounter this reality ("the clamor of / cars and people …") and to elicit from it the substance of art and beauty ("the stars drumming and poems / leaping from shattered windows"). The contemplating self of the poem's beginning does not keep to solitude but, as in "Matins," vii, goes out to meet the world and come upon the stuff of poetry there:

Marvelous Truth, confront us
at every turn,
in every guise, iron ball,
egg, dark horse, shadow,
cloud
of breath on the air,

dwell
in our crowded hearts
our steaming bathrooms, kitchens full of
things to be done, the
ordinary streets.

Thrust close your smile
that we know you, terrible joy.

Thus for Denise Levertov, as for certain other poets, it is proper, even imperative, for the literary enterprise to concentrate on assigning judgment and value, on finding the marvelous, within the particular range of personal observation and knowledge. If such writing is criticized for a lack of ambitious scope, one might reply that it compensates by a penetrating and scrupulous honesty, by a fundamental human resonance that is anything but restricted, and by a fidelity to the experience of contemporary life. Younger writers today, of almost every allegiance or group, have withdrawn their efforts from the elaboration of symbolic systems and mythologies; the Cantos, The Waste Land, The Duino Elegies, although they are still widely admired, apparently are looked upon as distant accomplishments. Now the poet believes he must use his art to define the space he inhabits as a person—if I may be permitted the figure—the space in which he exists, chooses and asserts value, loves and hates and dies. And so for Miss Levertov the poem is an instrument of personal measure, of tests and balances, estimating and preserving the valuable in the teeth of a public actuality that day by day magnifies its impersonality, falsity, and unreality. A poem such as "The Instant" rises out of personal experience and the depth of genuine emotion and significance attached to it by the author. As Miss Levertov's own testament the poem cannot be refuted or denied, for it stands well inside the space her poetic imagination circumscribes about her life as she lives it. Here is the complete poem, taken from her third book Overland to the Islands (1958); to cut it would be to destroy the form of an experience as she has realized it:

This poem is both an abbreviated narrative, dramatic in character (in this it resembles many poems by Robert Creeley, Paul Carroll, and others), and a spiritual adventure of a nearly ineffable sort. Within the tradition of post-Symbolist literature such a private illumination as the poet has here would be objectified into the order of a larger metaphorical universe—which is not to say that its value would be sacrificed, but that the value would be transmuted. But in the present poem the experience remains unchanged, is viewed in its own terms. Miss Levertov molds the event into art without abandoning the quality of direct utterance or leaving the domain of her life. The instant to which the poem's title refers is the moment of enlightenment that occurs when mist and clouds part to expose the far-off mountain peak shining in the early light of day and richly endowed with legendary meaning. Still, the poem retains its status as a poem of fact, so to speak, emerging from ordinary circumstances and immediate life, and returning there. We are acquainted with this kind of illumination in Blake or Rilke, though for them it confirms the basis of a whole mythological scheme: the world of things ablaze with the eternal Being they mirror. But 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. Her marriage may be a subject for investigation:

I want to speak to you.
To whom else should I speak?
It is you who make
a world to speak of.
In your warmth the
fruits ripen—all the
apples and pears that grow
on the south wall of my
head. If you listen
it rains for them, then
they drink. If you
speak in response
the seeds
jump into the ground.
Speak or be silent: your silence
will speak to me.
("The Marriage, II")

or the city's winter streets and the snatches of conversation overheard there:

This delighted involvement with what most of us continually neglect as trivia or noise, and the ability to carry out, as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams do, poetic conquests in the categories of the prosaic, are so natural to Miss Levertov's temperament that she seems scarcely to think of them. She is totally alive to each fluctuation, each breath and vibration of the atmosphere through which she moves with watchful ease. Poetry speaks to her with the innocent tongues of children:

Even though I find it hard to picture Miss Levertov as an aesthetic theorist musing abstractly upon the rightful function of poetry in a hyper-industrialized society, I am sure that in practice poetry is for her an integral part of the acts, thoughts, and gestures of living. In many of her poems we cross into a world very like our own, with the same ornaments and refuse, commonplaces and strokes of grace, but it is also a world made splendid and different by this poet's wise and clear apprehension of it, her abundant imagination. Poems do more than leap from windows; they appear in the humblest, most mundane things, such as this image, seized from a minute's glance out of the poet's kitchen window over the city at sunset:

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. And that is no mean achievement for any poet, though it is not the only one Miss Levertov can boast. Another side of her work has slowly asserted itself in two later books, With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1959) and The Jacob's Ladder (1961). I have already alluded to this visionary disposition in discussing "The Instant," but the subsequent pieces rely much more on dream, mystical imagery, and meditation than they do on external conditions that are suddenly transfigured. Some of these poems reflect on the sources of art and imagination and are developments in the line of "Something to Wear," though they find their materials in a deeper layer of consciousness. "The Goddess," "The Well," and The Illustration," from The Jacob's Ladder, are excellent representatives of this category. Other poems press forward on a spiritual journey whose purpose is to uncover the nature of self and its destiny. Miss Levertov's father was a Russian Jew who later became an Anglican clergyman; something of this combination, plus her reading in Biblical, Hasidic, and other mystical writings, undoubtedly has had a decisive influence on these poems.

An example of her meditational poetry is the title poem "With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads"; here Miss Levertov brings to focus two planes of reality that seem to be distant but somehow border one another. The problem is how to get from the first into the second, and the poet addresses herself to it:

With eyes at the back of our heads
we see a mountain
not obstructed with woods but laced
here and there with feathery groves.

The doors before us in a façade
that perhaps has no house in back of it
are too narrow, and one is set too high
with no doorsill. The architect sees
the imperfect proposition and
turns eagerly to the knitter.
Set it to rights!
The knitter begins to knit.

For we want
to enter the house, if there is a house,
to pass through the doors at least
into whatever lies beyond them,

we want to enter the arms
of the knitted garment. As one
is re-formed, so the other,
in proportion.

When the doors widen
when the sleeves admit us
the way to the mountain will clear,
the mountain we see with
eyes at the back of our heads, mountain

green, mountain
cut of limestone, echoing
with hidden rivers, mountain
of short grass and subtle shadows.

Miss Levertov gives us here a parable of the inner life, a metaphorical presentation of spiritual pilgrimage in the individual. The heart of the poem appears paradoxical because the mountain, which is an image of paradisiacal proportions, a depiction of the Great Good Place, is seen only within, by intuition (the "eyes at the back of our heads"), while the obstacles to be overcome and those to which we have to accommodate ourselves lie before us. Yet, as in Heraclitus and Eliot's Four Quartets, the way forward and the way back are one and the same. Thus movement ahead, with the alterations of the self it requires, will be completed in a reconciliation of the inner image of a desired goal with a personal condition of life. Perhaps what we are being told is, "The Kingdom of God is within you." In this, as in her other remarkable poems, Miss Levertov subtly points the way to see with our whole sight.