Writing Between the Lines

Born in Essex, England, Denise Levertov became a U.S. citizen after her marriage to Mitchell Goodman, the writer who was indicted, with Benjamin Spock and the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, for his antiwar activities. She came to New York to live in 1948.

Levertov acknowledges that her writing was influenced by William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan. After her first book, The Double Image (1946), was published in England in 1946, she did not produce another volume until 1957, when City Lights brought out Here and Now. In 1961 she was poetry editor for the Nation, and in 1965 she received the grant in literature from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Her essays collected in The Poet in the World (1973) and Light Up the Cave are written with a penetrating intelligence. Winner of numerous awards and prizes, she is a poet of reverence and fierce moral drive.

Denise Levertov died December 20, 1997. 020