MEMORIAL RESOLUTION                                                  SenD#4825
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                              Denise Levertov
                                (1923-1997)


On December 20th, 1997 Denise Levertov died after a struggle with lymphoma.  
She was seventy five years of age.  She had lived in Seattle for over a decade 
and she died there, surrounded by family and friends.  Though she described 
herself proudly in one of her poems as "London born", her life of expression 
and achievement was lived in the United States.  Most of her books of poetry 
were written and published here.  Her deepest, most eloquent engagements were 
with American poetry and politics.  She was a superb teacher in the American 
tradition of poetry, albeit with the revisions and modifications of a 
genuinely radical poetic intelligence.  From 1982 to 1993, during the years 
she taught at Stanford, she brought her particular distinction of spirit and 
ambition to the English Department, and especially the Creative Writing 
Program.  She became a vivid and lovingly remembered presence within the 
Department and the University.  She relished the music, the argument and the 
communal feel of the Stanford campus.  And she gave to it, memorably, the 
witness of her ethics, the sound of her voice, and her seamless witness to 
both poetry and activism.

Denise Levertov was born in London in October, 1923, of parents whose 
religious and imaginative character shaped both her sense of herself and her 
poetic vocation.  Her father was a Russian Hasidic Jew who converted to 
Christianity, emigrated to England, became an Angican priest, and was active 
in Jewish-Christian dialogue in Britain between the world wars.  Her Welsh 
mother had several visionaries among her forebears.  Denise's first book, The 
Double Image, published in Britain in 1946, brought her recognition as one of 
a group poets dubbed the "New Romantics." Marriage to the American writer 
Mitchell Goodman brought her to this country; they settled in New York City 
with summers in Maine, and their son Nickolai was born in 1949.  The move to 
the U. S. immersed Denise in a very different poetic and cultural scene from 
what she had known.  She quickly and deeply absorbed the American tradition, 
from the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau to the formal 
experimentation of Ezra Pound and, especially William Carlos Williams, and in 
the process she re-made herself as a poet, and challenged American poetry to 
take account of that remaking.

In addition to more than 20 volumes of poetry-- ranging from her first 
American collection Here and How (1946) to Sands of the Well (1996), Denise 
published two volumes of translation, and four prose books of essays, mostly 
about poetry and politics, and autobiographical sketches.  Her poems of the 
fifties and sixties won her immediate and excited recognition, not just from 
peers like Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan, but from the avant garde poets 
of an earlier generation like Kenneth Rexroth and William Carlos Williams 
himself.  In their different ways they responded to her extraordinary gifts of 
diction and rhythm and structure, and her idiosyncractic fusion of mystery and 
ordinariness.  She was linked with the group of "Black Mountain" poets because 
they all published in The Black Mountain Review, edited by her friend Creeley. 

But to point out the lyric vision of Denise Levertov's poetry would be an 
incomplete emphasis without also recording how it darkened, became injured and 
turned with wounded power on the conduct of the Vietnam War.  During the 
sixties and seventies, her poems were often a scalding critique of 
exploitation, waste and the plunder of the environment.  Beginning in the mid-
eighties her poems became more explicitly religious, and the mystery of the 
Christian Incarnation linked and grounded her sense of communal love and the 
continuous sacrament of experience.

Denise Levertov loved Stanford.  She spoke to friends about the vitality of 
the students, their creative gifts; about moonrise on the Quad and the 
excellence of music at Dinkelspiel.  Her papers are, very appropriately, in 
Green Library.  The Levertov Archive in Special Collections stands as a major 
rescue for scholars in modern poetry.  And she is further commemorated in the 
Denise Levertov Poetry Prize, to be awarded annually from 1999, for the best 
undergraduate poem on the environment.  In these ways, as well as through all 
the individual affections of memory, Stanford maintains a treasured memory of 
her courage, her language, her unique witness to the art and honour of poetry.


                                              Committee:

                                                Eavan Boland, Chair
                                                John Felstiner
                                                Albert Gelpi