Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov (1923 – 1997) was an English-born American poet, essayist, and political activist who wrote deceptively concrete verses on personal and political themes.
Born near London in 1923, Denise Levertov spent her formative years in England, having been educated at home. From an early age, she had a strong belief in her vocation as a poet and stated that she decided to write at the age of five. When she was seventeen, her first poem was published in... Quarterly Poetry.
During World War II, she became a civilian nurse serving in London during the bombings. He wrote his first book, The Double Image, when he was between seventeen and twenty-one years old.
After moving to the United States, she was introduced to the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, the formal experimentation of Ezra Pound, and, in particular, the work of William Carlos Williams. With the publication of her first American book, Here and now (1956), he became an important voice of the American avant-garde. His poems from the fifties and sixties brought him immediate and enthusiastic recognition, not only from colleagues like Creeley and Duncan, but also from avant-garde poets of an earlier generation, such as Williams and Kenneth Rexroth.
Throughout her life, Denise Levertov was deeply concerned with social justice and political action, from movements against war and nuclear annihilation to environmental protection and support for revolutionary campaigns in Central America. She and her husband were strong critics of the Vietnam War. She helped found The Writers’ and Artists’ Protest against the War in Vietnam, edited an anthology of anti-war poetry for the Draft Resisters League In 1967, she called for political action in her poetry readings and college lectures. Her husband was one of the Boston Five on trial for promoting resistance to the draft in 1968. She was a victim of police abuse, was arrested, and wrote about her experiences in both poetry and essays.
In total, Denise Levertov published more than twenty volumes of poetry and also authored four books of prose. From 1982 to 1993, she taught at Stanford University.
On December 20, 1997, he died from complications of lymphoma. He was seventy-four years old.