Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov
Denise Levertovwas a British-born American poet...
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 October 1923
teacher jobs teaching
Teachers at all levels encourage the idea that you have to talk about things in order to understand them, because they wouldn't have jobs, otherwise. But it's phony, you know.
girl two secret
Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.
dog children sleep
I thought I was growing wings— it was a cocoon. I thought, now is the time to step into the fire— it was deep water. Eschatology is a word I learned as a child: the study of Last Things; facing my mirror—no longer young, the news—always of death, the dogs—rising from sleep and clamoring and howling, howling.... ("Seeing For a Moment")
encouragement imagination affliction
Affliction is more apt to suffocate the imagination than to stimulate it.
book thinking effectiveness
I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.
pain white knowing
Death and pain dominate this world, for though many are cured, they leave still weak, still tremulous, still knowing mortality has whispered to them; have seen in the folding of white bedspreads according to rule the starched pleats of a shroud.
prayer spring flames
At Delphi I prayed to Apollo that he maintain in me the flame of the poem and I drank of the brackish spring there....
flower light gold
slowly the pale dew-beads of light lapped up from flowers can thicken, darken to gold: honey of the human.
happiness breathing quiet
So absolute, it is no other than happiness itself, a breathing too quiet to hear.
white fog black
The last cobwebs of fog in the black firtrees are flakes of white ash in the world's hearth.
art artist born
The artist must create himself or be born again.
artistic-life artistic process
It is fatal to one's artistic life to talk about something this is in process.
women fall ebb-and-flow
If woman is inconstant, good, I am faithful to ebb and flow, I fall in season and now is a time of ripening.
attitude moving poetry
Prophetic utterance, like poetic utterance, transforms experience and moves the receiver to new attitudes. The kinds of experience--the recognitions or revelations--out of which both prophecy and poetry emerge, are such as to stir the prophet or poet to speech that may exceed their own known capacities; they are "inspired," they breathe in revelation and breathe out new words; and by so doing they transfer over to the listener or reader a parallel experience, a parallel intensity, which impels that person into new attitudes and new actions.