Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960

Denise Levertov

Her imagination is always religiously open, and it always responds to what touches it awake. It is a quick, luminous mind, protected by wisdom…

James Wright

Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960

Poetry by Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov’s Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960 brings under one cover the first published works of a poet who, though born and raised in Great Britain, has long held a distinctive place in postwar American letters. Initiating a major literary undertaking, the volume includes a group of hitherto ungathered poems, selections from Ms. Levertov’s earliest book, The Double Image (1946), published in London, and her three following collections in their entirety: Here and Now (1957), Overland to the Islands (1958), and With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1960). Living in the United States since the late 1940s, Ms. Levertov has often been associated with the Black Mountain poets, while from the mid- 1960s onward she has been one of the foremost activists in the antiwar and anti-nuclear movements. Yet even in her more “political” poems, her dominant perception has continued to be of the intricate beauty, the mystery of life as it is lived. In announcing Ms. Levertov the winner of the 1975 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Hayden Carruth said of her: “For twenty-five years Denise Levertov has been one of our most prominent poets… Today she is a woman at the crest of her maturity, acute in perceptions, wise in responses, and an artist, moreover, whose technique has kept pace with her personal development.” With Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960, readers have the opportunity of following Ms. Levertov’s remarkable poetic development from its very beginnings.

Buy Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960

Paperback(published May, 01 1979)

ISBN
9780811207188
Price US
10.95

Clothbound(published May, 01 1979)

ISBN
9780811207171
Portrait of Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov

Poet and political activist

Her imagination is always religiously open, and it always responds to what touches it awake. It is a quick, luminous mind, protected by wisdom…

James Wright

Levertov continues to be one of the indispensable poets of our language, one of those few writers to whom it is necessary to pay attention.

The Malahat Review

It is poetry which brings us the kind of satisfaction we associate with the epical sensibility: a communion–but concrete, nothing hazy or suppressive of individual consciousness–in a known world.

Hayden Carruth