Denise Levertov

Book excerpt: Through careful analysis of Levertov's social verse, she demonstrates that there is a consistency and pattern in what the artist herself has termed the "poems of engagement." Denise Levertov began her career in England as a lyric poet in the Romantic mode, but even then was touched by the reductive nature of war, revealed in her first published poem, "Listening to Distant Guns." During the mid-1960s Levertov's social conscience, notably her strong antiwar sentiment, was reawakened by the Vietnam War. This reawakening resulted in several volumes of poetry that mirrored her concerns with the war (and political activism at home) and her perplexity at the nature of human beings - often great and compassionate, but at times cruel and insensitive. There exists a common thread in Levertov's pilgrimage from her beginning as a lyric poet to her status as an artist definitively in the world: she has always responded to everything within the compass of her experience.