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COPYRIGHT 2005 Marquette University Press
IN 1963, at the Vancouver Poetry Conference, Denise Levertov dedicated her poem, "The Necessity," to Robert Creeley, paying tribute to the role he bad played in helping her to realize a coherent style after her move from England to America in the late forties. "The Necessity" is a poem about the poet's need to substantiate experience in language. In it Levertov recognizes the difficulties and tensions that attend the accurate expression of inner moods and attitudes. She suggests it is the poet's attention to such psychological "necessity" that enlivens each "part of speech" in a poem, without which it remains "a power / in abeyance" (Poems 58).
Levertov's tribute to Creeley was appropriate because he had, in fact, supported her in the search for a style that would parallel, on the aesthetic plane, the complexities of her life as a recent emigrant from England, who was also newly married and a mother. After serving as a civilian nurse during the war in London, in 1947 Levertov married an American, Mitchell Goodman, whom she had met in Geneva on a trip in Europe. Together they returned to New York City in 1948, where their son was born in 1949. Creeley and Levertov first met there in 1949 through her husband, who had known Creeley in their student days at Harvard. During those first years in New York, Levertov felt her poetry to be foundering, so great were the demands on her, not only to fulfill a new domestic role, but to hear and speak in a new way. Creeley also was just beginning to find a distinctive voice, having returned from the American Field Service in east Asia, married, and become a father. He tried to start a poetry magazine that would publish new writing in the tradition of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and he encouraged Levertov to submit poems, connecting her with a vital peer group. Most important, it was exciting for her to meet a young American poet who already knew Williams's poetry, which she had discovered the year before while still in Europe, recognized as important, but could not fully appreciate because of differences in American speech. (1)
Their relationship blossomed in 1951 when Creeley lived near Levertov in the south of France. With Williams's poetry as a guide, Levertov had begun to write the poems she considered her first American poems, which Creeley helped her to revise and publish. Through him she also became aware of Charles Olson's ideas about composition by field. Despite common interests and concerns, however, the contact with Creeley also reflected differences in background as well as individual psychological dilemmas. Although the lives of both had been changed irrevocably by the war, marriage and parenthood, each had emerged from these experiences with a different relation to the past. In fact, as I shall argue here, when we examine two early poems by Levertov on which Creeley commented in conjunction with their respective responses to Williams and Olson, we see that it was by differentiating herself from Creeley that Levertov began to achieve the consolidation she sought. We find that consolidation in "Overland to the Islands," the title poem of her third book, and the first in which we find all the elements of her mature voice.
WORLD War Two is the background of the first poems published by both poets. Levertov's "Listening to Distant Guns" was written during or just before the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940. The seventeen-year-old Levertov was living in Buckinghamshire, an inland county to which her ballet school had been evacuated, but she could still hear the guns booming across the Channel. Focusing on the responses of flowers, birds, and the sky, rather than on that of people, her poem captures the stoicism of her countrymen as they endure the loss of loved ones: "The bloodless clarity of evening's sky / Betrays no whisper of the battle-scream" (Collected Earlier Poems 3). Similarly the poems in her first book, The Double Image (1946), respond to the civilian experience of war. Yet, while sorrowful in tone, these poems are dreamy and nostalgic; although Levertov had spent three years as a hospital nurse in London, she was not able to bring that experience directly into her poetry. Instead she adopted a neo-Romantic style, having allied herself with contemporary English poets who were reacting against a "gospel of artistic impersonality" that had dominated the intellectual world on the eve of the war (Rexroth xii). These New Romantic poets took Rilke as a model, adopting a "ruminative melancholy" that they found characteristic (Rexroth xvi). Levertov, in particular, responded to Rilke's "intense joy in the visual," which he described...
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