Denise Levertov’s Politics
By: Alan Asnen
Tags: Politics And Protest, Feminism, Denise Levertov, Poetry Criticism, Essay

Denise Levertov’s Politics

The Poetry of Personhood for the Masses

Poems discussed, “Matins” and “An Interim”

poetrysociety.org

“In no time at all Denise came to talk like a mildly internationalized young woman living in New York (City) but alive to all the life of speech in the country.”

And so, using Kenneth Rexroth’s pinpointing, we may rise above any argument as to Denise Levertov’s “mere” British roots to perhaps the more important perspective of her universality…or at least her adaptability. It is her universality, her ability to reach all people, to which we would speak in terms of her “people’s” voice.

One fashion in which this voice expresses itself most vigorously is her political poetry. Yet some disagreement exists as to how “political” her poetry is. Indeed, some suggest that Levertov’s political poetry, and her poetry in general, serves as little more than a metaphor for the poetic process.

While there may be some valuable insight through this thesis it seems apparent, not only from Levertov’s poetry but from her prose as well that the intent of her poetry is sincerely political. Any other explication serves someone else’s purposes.

First, examine what is perhaps Levertov’s major poem from the period in which her political activism was beginning to congeal; then a major poem from her political maturity. This will show that her underlying subject matter sees no substantial change throughout.

The first poem, “Matins,” contains no overt political statement in the sense that Levertov herself uses the term:

“Politics (is what) we call our immediate social environment when it is critically examined, whether favorably or unfavorably (which become, in perspective, history).”

In “Matins,” she is not looking at her “social environment.” Instead, she is exploring the process of discovering an exterior value, what she calls in the poem’s first words, “The authentic!” With this work, Levertov seems to have arrived at a profound point of departure. Richard Howard described this as:

“How to get the effort of the ascent inside herself and enacted by her language, rather than by a heap of found symbols to which her language could be only applied — that was to be Denise Levertov’s discovery…”

Even though Howard believes this discovery to have been made wholly “coterminously with her discovery of America,” Levertov had been in North America for nearly fifteen years when, suddenly, she was expressing the “discovery” of “The authentic!” in “rhythmic knockings” of a radiator, “breaking the handle of (her) hairbrush,” and other mundane acts and events which progressively, in their simplicity, take on a deeper and more fundamental beauty — not quite that of transcendence, but as perceived elements in the here and now.

This is the authenticity within, or of, all these item and events which still seems to escape her:

The authentic! It rolls

just out of reach, beyond

running feet and

stretching fingers, down

the green slope and into

the black waves of the sea.

What she is finally cognizant of, is the fact that “Marvelous Truth” will always dominate, that it has a power like human consciousness to reveal and yet remain unrevealed itself. Thus, she ends this poem on the note:

Thrust close your smile

that we know you, terrible joy.

Not, “that we may know you,” which might imply that we do, but, “we know you,” which indicates, by that which we know you.

Levertov understands, clearly, the power “The authentic!” commands in her life and all our lives; how it benignly smiles upon us, often bemused by our efforts to surpass it. But more important, she chooses a side, on this side of “Truth,” on our side of it. She does so comfortably, without having to rely upon sophistication or ostentation, and without having to deny who she is and what she possesses. As Rexroth puts it:

“…she is more civilized. One thing she has which (her contemporaries such as Olsen and Ginsberg) lack conspicuously is what Ezra Pound calls culture… She is securely humane in a way very few people are any more…a humanism older than the Renaissance, so well founded that it penetrates every bit of life.”

In other words, Levertov is telling us that she is one of us.

She begins “Matins” with a series of images which are related to one specific item, rhythm. She verbally connects rhythm with “The authentic!” ultimately. We can argue as to whether Levertov is focusing upon rhythm in order to give it prominence in our perception of her poetic theory.

In the fourth stanza, she drops this imagery and begins a thematic rise into the deeper metaphysical heart of her subject matter. Throughout, she is creating a poem about poetry and the search, in the initial stage of the creative process, for that which has the greatest meaning in poetry.

However, it is also about the way we live our lives and what drives us forward.

In the first stanza, “The authentic!” is compared to,

the almost silent

ripping apart of giant

sheets of cellophane…

the alarm bell…

takes form….

…the radiator in rhythmic knockings

…rhythmic strokes…

The image of rhythm and sound continues into the third stanza, but then a change is taking place. At first the poet is awakening to a new day, moving out of the dream state from a sleep where “The authentic!” can be discovered but discounted as dream. Then, she is fully awake to the day yet “The authentic!” is still a presence.

By the third stanza “The authentic! “is not mentioned, no longer present even as an apparition. But another image is introduced along with the continuing image of rhythm and sound:

…knocking in the pipes

with rhythms it seizes for its own

to speak of its invention —

the real, the new-laid

egg whose speckled shell

the poet fondles and must break

if he will be nourished.

With the breaking of the morning egg, comes the knowledge some process is reproduced like the process of creation. The authenticity of the egg is found in breaking it open and deriving nourishment from it. Yet the egg no longer exists after this is accomplished.

As with anything authentic, the poet must take it apart, in effect somehow destroy it in order to use it, to create from it.

The effect of this process is described in the fourth stanza:

A shadow painted where

yes, a shadow must fall.

The cow’s breath

not forgotten in the mist, in the

words. Yes,

verisimilitude draws up

heat in us, zest

to follow through,

follow through,

follow

transformations of the day

in its turning, in its becoming.

The “cow’s breath” is “not forgotten in the mist, in the/words.” Not forgotten but changed. It is no longer the “cow’s breath” “in the mist” but words representing this.

We can note that, without mentioning rhythm in the fourth stanza, Levertov pays homage to her rhythmic mentor. For in reading this stanza we are immediately reminded of William Carlos Williams’ poem, “To a Poor Old Woman,” and the lines:

They taste good to her.

They taste good

to her. They taste

good to her.

Thus, the rhythm has been applied, even if not mentioned; the images have been transferred to words; the egg has been broken and nourishment received. As needs be.

In the fifth stanza, the poet begins to interact within the mundane aspects of her life, in this instance with her son: feeding him breakfast, preparing to ship him off to school. Still, while she and her son

…eat we think,

as we think an undercurrent

of dream runs through us

faster than thought

towards recognition.

The state of awakening is still upon her and yet, it is no longer a dream but an “undercurrent,” a sense of dream-like state. She runs after her son; leaving for school, he has forgotten his glasses.

At the door, “Cold air/comes in…” and reawakens her in the sixth and final stanza to “The authentic!” once again.

It now has her fully in its grip, is taking her to a point of contact and awareness which she has not before fully achieved. In full consciousness of the day and its authenticity, she goes beyond mere imagery, chasing after “The authentic!” as

…it rolls

just out of reach, beyond

running feet and

stretching fingers, down

the green slope and into

the black waves of the sea.

What is this “sea”? Is it the fullness of her own consciousness? Is it a body of water? She acknowledges that when she finds this authenticity in that sea, she must kill it so that it can

…step out

of (its) bones and flystrewn meat

tall, smiling, renewed,

formed in your own likeness…

And, finally, confronting this “Marvelous Truth” in its various guises of

iron ball,

egg, dark horse, shadow,

cloud

of breath on the air,

she also sees that it dwells

in our crowded hearts

our steaming bathrooms, kitchens full of

things to be done, the

ordinary streets.

She sees the two extremes of “The authentic!” as it approaches her consciousness. She realizes it in words from what she perceives non-verbally with her consciousness. She understands that there is no separation between her work and her consciousness, between her consciousness and her reality; and she sees in this contrasting weight of images a point of balance. As she states:

“The didactic has a place in poetry but only when it is inseparable from the intuitive — e.g., opinion is not a source of poetry, but the poetry of political anguish is at its best both didactic and lyrical.”

And what politics is she speaking of here? The politics of being a woman, a housewife, a mother.

This searching for balance is all-encompassing for Levertov, reaching every aspect of her work and being: between form and content, didacticism and lyricism, thinking and feeling, even the essentials of poetry and life itself.

“The interaction of life on art and art on life is continuous…that poetry be not divided from the rest of life is necessary to it. Both life and poetry fade, wilt, shrink, when they are divorced.”

Neither can stand without the other in authentic poetry. This seeking for balance is not the exclusive territory of the poet. For

“…a poet is only a poet when engaged in making poems, and has no rightful claim to feeling more than others, but only being able to articulate feeling through the medium of language.”

Levertov understands the contemporary difficulty regarding acceptance of polemical poetry as poetry, even while she sees and lives out the authenticity in the experiences of politics in everyday life as a feminist, as someone protesting against war and for the rights of others.

She also sees that political poetry has a long tradition in Anglo-American verse, reaching back at least as far as “Piers Ploughman.” But some dilution in the poetic tradition has occurred.

“Even before the lyric — both as a mode and as an element in other modes — came to be more and more highly valued…the novel had swiftly developed and had taken over many of the subjects previously accommodated by non-lyric poetry. Thus there developed a distrust of the political when it did turn up in verse, since poetry and lyric form became almost synonymous to many people…”

Because the political poem had been identified with epic poetry to the extent that

“…we have come to identify the short poem with the lyric even when it lacks lyricism, and consequently, often fail to recognize the lyric spirit if it appears in company with the didactic…a political poem may block the reader from responding to its sensuous and emotive power simply because expectation does not link these elements with political convictions.”

She understands that politics is the province of the people in a democracy, but that the poet has become divorced from the people’s consciousness…and from the poet’s own consciousness as well.

Levertov wants to break down the wall of separation between poet and person, to eliminate the idea of poet as somehow “special” in any sense other than the production of poetry. She is, as G. Thurley put it so “delicately” in 1977, “the poet-housewife/mother.”

When finally, fully confronting and assuming her political position, and especially her opposition to the war in Vietnam, Levertov’s desire to maintain the appropriate balance seemed to create an impossible task. She insists that, “A violent imitation of the horrors of our time” is not the concern of poetry.

She says in “Advent”(1966):

…Because of this my strong sight,

my clear caresive sight, my poet’s sight I was given

that it might stir me to song,

is blurred.

There is a cataract filming over

my inner eyes. Or else a monstrous insect

has entered my head, and looks out

from my sockets with multiple vision…

We may surmise that this “blurred vision,” the “insect” is what befalls us all as the knowledge of what is transpiring overseas creeps into our consciousness slowly, as it did in those days of not-so-instant media, relating how the war blurs the vision of all people; how it creates a barrier, a “cataract” between ourselves and our reality.

In “An Interim,” Levertov further explores the effects of this blurring and on the society in an ambitious experimental work, longer than most of what she had attempted previously, and incorporating techniques used previously by Dos Passos with extensive passages pulled from mass media.

The poem itself concerns thoughts and events while awaiting her husband’s trial for anti-war activities. The blurred vision has forced her into a level of activism, of a living didacticism which tends to separate her from the lyrical in her life and makes her poetic self “shrink” to the extent that

the soul dwindles sometimes to an ant

rapid upon a cracked surface.

These lines from the short first stanza establish the tone of her approach; tell us her position, explaining her weakening in the process.

She turns the mirror of consciousness back to the reader. In the second stanza she reveals how language itself becomes corrupt during war, that language…

virtue of man, touchstone

worn down by what

gross friction…

becomes twisted so that an Army spokesman can say, “It became necessary/to destroy the town to save it.” This leaves the poet wondering if “…language, mother of thought,/(is) rejecting us as we reject (it)…”

Levertov explores the plight of a teenage peace activist sentenced to a harsh confinement and reveals in her own protest the passion and courage of many involved in the anti-war movement. She brings us to a beach in Puerto Rico where she enjoyed a “Peace as grandeur.” Here she recollects a time when

… At fourteen

after measles my mother took me

to stay by the sea…

…I read

to myself Richard Jefferies’

The Story of My Heart

By introducing Jefferies’ discourse, she refers back to the seeking of balance and total contact with nature. These are the same sentiments she explores in “Matins.” And in this stanza, in recollecting this memory, she reaches the understanding that peace itself — perhaps in the absence of war, perhaps just in the moment of escape from wartime — might be

that grandeur, that dwelling

in majestic presence, attuned

to the great pulse.

This even though she, with Jefferies, knows there is no ultimate knowledge, and no contact with anything that might ultimately know. She is saying this as if, perhaps, we live always in the absence of such peace, that we have nothing but interims in our lives hoping for such peace, breaks from the wars going on all around us.

Or, perhaps, she has outgrown Jefferies?

In the fifth stanza, she relates how even her dreams are greatly affected by the war, and she acknowledges that her dreams are sources for her poetry. In her dream, she sees a city which is “half Berlin, half Chicago,” significant reference points. She finds herself held prisoner like her husband, like that young man, by the war itself, perhaps, like others, perhaps, paraded

…through the streets,

dressed in our prisoners’ robes —

smocks of brown holland —

and the people watched us pass

and waved to us, and gave us serious smiles of hope.

Here she combines images of war resisters, war prisoners and war parades, incredibly mixing the jeering of North Vietnamese crowds around POWs into a vortex, turning them into cheering supporters of the prisoners’ plight.

She talks about her “cramp of fury,” the “great savage saints of outrage,” and those among us “who/don’t dare imagine death,” before ending the poem with a quote from that incarcerated youth who says,

“I have a medical problem that can be cured

only by freedom.”

It is a problem Levertov suffers from as well, living in a life of wartime, kept shielded from the truth which can only, possibly, be revealed by peace. It is the problem she senses as a human being, as one of us, and not as the “supersensitive” poet.