Rules of Engagement: A Look2 Essay on Denise Levertov’s War Poetry
“Is there a poetry of peace?” asked the poet Denise Levertov in her 1989 essay, “Poetry and Peace: Some Broader Dimensions,” only to answer in that very essay: “No.” After all, how can there be a poetry of something that was never deeply experienced, never deeply felt? She claimed that, like a poem, peace cannot be there ahead of itself.
By then, the already-accomplished poet had looked all around, and everywhere she saw wars. She saw social injustice, with its economic, racial, and educational dimensions, and its deficits of hunger, homelessness, crime, violence, abuse, and lack of medical care. She saw the destruction of our planet, with the degradation of the biosphere, oil spills, and deforestation. She saw a nearly constant state of emergency—so much so that she wrote, “If there begins to be a poetry of peace, it is still, as it has long been, a poetry of struggle.”
But she also saw, through all those wars, poetry that could help make peace. Levertov, a lyrical poet of great repute known primarily for her poems on family life, nature, and religious themes, deserves recognition for her substantial contribution to the canon of war poetry, a canon of literature almost entirely written by men.
Levertov grew up in an intensely politically and socially aware environment. She was born between the two world wars, on October 24, 1923, in the town of Ilford, Essex, in England. She was the daughter of Beatrice Adelaide Spooner-Jones, a schoolteacher of Welsh heritage with artistic proclivities, and the Reverend Paul Philip Levertoff, a converted Russian Hassidic Jew, who served as a priest in the Church of England.
Levertov’s parents had met in 1910, in Constantinople, where her mother had signed a contract with a local school, and her father, by then a reputable speaker, had arrived at the city for a lecture series. The two met and fell in love, and when her father proposed after a few months of courtship, her mother happily accepted. The newlyweds traveled widely throughout Europe before settling first in Warsaw, Poland, and then in Leipzig, Germany.
During the First World War in Germany, the young couple—together with their newborn, Olga, Levertov’s elder sister—were considered “enemy aliens.” Her father was a Russian citizen, and her mother was British. Where many foreign nationals in Leipzig were interned as civilian prisoners of war, the University of Leipzig had arranged for Levertov’s father to teach at the University and so the family remained in their apartment under house arrest. They had to report weekly to the police station and had difficulty buying food. Because he had been insulted and threatened, Levertov’s father once threw a German sergeant down the stairs. In light of these immense difficulties, after the armistice, the family sewed their valuables into their garments and made their way to Denmark before crossing the North Sea into England. Levertov’s family heritage and history embedded in her what she later called, with more than a modicum of pride, “humanitarian politics.”
As a young child in England, Levertov watched her mother canvass for the League of Nations. She watched her father soapbox in protest of Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia and later, Britain’s lack of support for Spain’s government during its civil war. She watched her family work on behalf of war refugees from 1933 onwards, an effort that included rescuing a group of teenagers, each with one Jewish parent, during the Second World War.
Levertov wrote a short autobiographical story based on her experience of 1933 titled “Growing Up, or When Anna Screamed” in Light Up the Cave. In the story, the then ten-year-old Levertov, her elder sister, Olga, and two refugees, Anna and Gerhardt, move through villages, groves of trees, and isolated farmhouses in the countryside of Essex. The four children come upon an enclosed field with a barn. After a day of dancing with rabbits and singing songs, the children notice that the barn is full of old but sweet-smelling hay. Mounds and mounds of it, which they instinctively dive into. Levertov writes,
But all at once, from silent Anna … came a chilling scream. We stopped in our tracks as if playing ‘Statues.’ Horrified. And she opened her mouth and screamed again: she was staring at something. We looked—we saw it. It was a shining, grinningly curved scythe blade thrusting up through the soft warm gold.
There was nothing to say. No need to tell each other any one of us might have been killed, mutilated. That we had escaped the event seemed less forcible a recognition than that the deadly crescent had so mockingly been there with us the whole time.
Though the four children had spent the day soaked in the hush of nature, with thistles and birds, war had always been between them.
It comes as no surprise that Levertov’s first published poem was a war poem. “Listening to Distant Guns” was published in 1940; Levertov was sixteen at the time. She was a young girl attending the Legat School of Ballet, which had been evacuated to Buckinghamshire from London. The first stanza reads:
The roses tremble; oh, the sunflower’s eye
Is opened wide in sad expectancy.
Westward and back the circling swallows fly
The rooks’ battalions dwindle near the hill.
The roses, the sunflower, and the swallows feel the pulsation of encroaching war and convey their experiences through the poet’s translations. For Levertov, the natural world is alive with the consciousness of war. That consciousness is visionary and can foresee the future. The flowers and the swallows notice war’s nearing invasion before the human-made bell “breaks the evening’s silent dream” and before the human sound whispers “of the battle scream.” Here, Levertov reminds the reader that the natural world is stirred by the pulsation of air that a cannon creates by firing. Though the roses cannot tremble from fear in the same way that humans do, they tremble nonetheless. This trembling can (and does) become a precursor for human distress.
Levertov discovered her first category of war poetry quite early: poems praising the living earth, which invite its protection. Levertov’s early poems often introduce prosopopoeia—the trope of personification in which a subject (animate or inanimate) is able to “speak” from its own perspective—at the very moment when war enters the poem’s semantic field. Crucially, Levertov’s prosopopoeia resists, at least in part, the inherent problem of projection. By describing war’s real effects on nature, she explores nature as a subject imbued with intentions and rights.
That’s not to say that Levertov always did so without failure. Even in this poem, where “trembling” and “expectancy” easily succeed in moving beyond the colonizing projections of the self, the insistence of the sunflower’s sensory experience as “sad” is perhaps a lost opportunity to see into the macrocosm of the sunflower. Flowers do not experience and control emotions the same way humans do, but that does not mean they don’t possess a sensitivity to the world around them. Though Levertov’s early poetry of war is anxiously aware of the experiences of the natural world, here she is still developing (and faltering through) an understanding that will serve her in later war poetry.
Another example of Levertov’s prosopopoeia in her early poetry—with its own successes and missteps—can be found in the never-before-published poem titled “Seer Green (2),” the second and final of her unpublished “Seer Green” poems, dated October 1942. She writes,
On an old story waxes, vast as dream—
lost in the larchwood, hear its echoing sound!
—or lurks in eddies of the sombre pond
and in that meadow laced about with flowers.
My dark green shadow moving on the grass
past reddening sorrel, past the mullein spire,
went down, before me to the hollow copse
to hear the whisper of an inland shire.
The beckoning tree grown taller every night
was shrunk at morning to a dwarf despair.
Far in the east the guns began to drum,
but summers’ crumbling was still unheard—
only the swallows listened & obeyed.
It’s easy to imagine that the poem’s opening quatrains act as a kind of mise-en-scène, pacing through the stage directions, the props, and the stage settings before pulling the curtain back to reveal the start of the drama. The speaker in this poem opens by posturing outside of the action—“On an old story waxes, vast as dream”—an opening that is defiantly reminiscent of the formulaic opening construction of folk and fairytales. The Grimm Brothers’ einmal, “once,” sets the scene of storytelling and allows the reader to settle into the imaginative space. That said, I write “defiantly reminiscent” of fairy and folk tales because what comes next is the opposite of magical. It is war.
The turn begins when the speaker introduces themselves into the poem in the second stanza. The speaker loses the distance and the exaggerated punctuation, opting instead for a stanza composed of a single full stop. The grand verbs are replaced with much simpler ones, as if humbling themselves in the presence of such lushness—the reddening sorrel, the hollow copse, the inland shire—these all know something that the speaker does not. The countryside itself possesses an ancient knowledge of the future terrors, like an oracle, and the speaker comes to listen to the wisdom that is whispered by the countryside.
In the distance, war is humming with its massive machine. Though the war’s music is still far, the tree and the swallows hear its tune. They are attuned to the forces that are gathering. And, for the poem’s moment, they seem to be the only ones. In the final stanza, the natural world speaks intimately about the catastrophe that is about to knock on England’s door.
And war was indeed about to knock. During those crucial years of the Second World War, Levertov witnessed the night sky shaking under heavy air raids. The church where her father officiated was bombed. Levertov left the school of ballet and briefly joined the land army. Later, at age nineteen, she began working in an intensive nursing program called the Civil Nursing Reserve, serving in several hospitals in London until the end of the war.
Levertov published her first book of poems, The Double Image, in 1946. Divided into two sections, “Fears” and “Promises,” the poems center around themes of nature, country life, a world “alive with love,” and, crucially, war. The critic Nereo Condini somewhat derogatorily labels Levertov’s early poems as tightly structured “Wordsworthian intimations.” According to Condini, the book includes poems celebrating the gifts of nature, in which war is centered, not as hatred or violence, but instead as a lack of love or an aridity of spirit. In one poem, “Christmas 1944,” Levertov writes, “gardens are blue with frost, and every carol / bears the burden of exile, a song of slaves. / Come in, then, poverty, and come in, death.” The dual relationship between nature and war, one which resists, at least in some places, Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy, would continue as a crucial thread weaving in and out of Levertov’s poetic life.
In 1947, Levertov met and married American veteran (field artillery) and writer Mitchell Goodman, and together they emigrated to the US and had a son named Nikolai. Though the economic aspect of the marriage was troubled from the get-go, according to Levertov’s biographer, Donna Krolik Hollenberg, “Like many young artists after the war, they were excited to be in an atmosphere of intellectual and social energy and openness.” It was during those years that, through her poetic connections—a bit by way of chance and a bit by way of destiny—Levertov became associated with the Black Mountain Poets.
Robert Creeley had rented a house near Levertov, and during that time, they saw each other a great deal. When the magazine Origin first launched, Creeley passed Levertov’s poems on to its editor. Origin became a home base of sorts for Levertov, Creeley, Charles Olson, and a little later, Robert Duncan. When Creeley began teaching at Black Mountain, he edited the Black Mountain Review, and he again published some of Levertov’s poetry. Though she was not stylistically or ideologically part of that school of poetics, she became known as part of that group, and she embraced the community and friendships throughout most of her life.
During those first years in America, Levertov largely moved away from the theme of war, as reflected in the publication of Here and Now (1956) and Overland to the Islands (1958). Both books focus on themes of love and her budding homelife. She later stated that she was too immature, in her mind, during those early years, both as a person and craftswoman, to fully engage with her experience of war.
The essay “Some Notes on Organic Form,” first published in Poetry in 1965, foreshadows a shift in Levertov’s thinking. In the essay, Levertov muses (a word she never uses lightly) on the process of writing poetry. She conceives of the poet as one who stands around, open-mouthed, breathing in experiences in the temple of life. A sight of the sky through a dusty window, birds and bits of paper—these moments of life demand of a poet their equivalent in speech. In other words, the poet is—the poet must be—brought to speech. Levertov believed that to force a poem’s message is to distort its truth, to distort the authentic revelation in the poem’s content.
If Levertov didn’t acknowledge that she forced any of her poems (her war poems included), it’s also true that she couldn’t have been said to be standing around open-mouthed, waiting for life to come to her. Increasingly alarmed by US involvement in the Vietnam War, in the mid to late 1960s, Levertov, together with her husband, attended rallies, contributed to anti-war leaflets, organized groups, and talked with students and soldiers. Levertov was even briefly imprisoned in connection to her anti-war activities.
Her political drive energized her poetry, and she wrote of war’s most troubling aspects in The Sorrow Dance (1967); somewhat in Relearning the Alphabet (1970); and again, forcefully, in To Stay Alive (1971). It was then that Levertov discovered her second category of war poetry: protest poems and poems that document the state of war and can help awaken an urgency to act.
In October of 1971, in the midst of the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War, Robert Duncan wrote a seething letter to Denise Levertov. He took issue with the opening stanza of her poem “Tenebrae”:
Heavy, heavy, heavy, hand and heart.
We are at war,
bitterly, bitterly at war
Duncan wrote to her, “You remember that you are committed to ‘opposition to the whole system of insane greed, or racism and imperialism’—a political stance: but we are the more aware that it comes to forestall any imagination of what that system is … These Denny,” he wrote, “are empty and vain slogans because those who use them are destitute of any imagination of or feeling of what such greed, racism or imperialism is like.” He stressed, “The role of the poet is not to oppose evil but to imagine it: what if Shakespeare had opposed Iago or Dostroevsky [sic] opposed Raskalnikov [sic]—the vital thing is that they created Iago and Raskalnikov [sic]. And we begin to see betrayal and murder and theft in a new light.”
But Levertov disagreed. “You have me wrong,” she said in one place in her reply to Duncan. “That is unmitigated bullshit,” she said in another. But these fighting words were not enough to stem the tide. Duncan continued to believe that Levertov’s Vietnam poems in To Stay Alive were moralizing and dogmatic, and he was not alone in his thinking. Academics, critics, and publishers alike bristled at the poems. Tom Maschler, her second English publisher at Cape, reportedly refused to publish the book because he found it “too political.” In Contemporary Literature, Marjorie G. Perloff wrote that the book contained “a quantity of bad confessional verse.” She considered Levertov’s volume to be full of “righteous indignation, uncompromising moral zeal,” and “self-important tone.” In a truly livid comment, Paul Breslin wrote, “Even in the early poems, there is a moralizing streak … and when she engaged, as so many poets did, with the Vietnam War, the moralist turned into a bully.” It was difficult for Levertov to stomach the barrage of criticism.
By 1971, Duncan and Levertov had been friends for almost two decades. Over the years, they had exchanged hundreds of letters of commentary on each other’s poems and details of intimate minutia. They shared everyday accomplishments and struggles, doodles, and reading suggestions. Yet Levertov’s Vietnam War poems and Duncan’s criticism of those poems proved an unbearable burden on their relationship. Each was unable to carry the weight of the other’s words.
Levertov’s disappointment in Duncan’s private (and later public) displeasure with her poems didn’t slow her poetry in the immediate period following his caustic letters. But in 1972, her trip to Hanoi—together with Muriel Rukeyser and Jane Hart—caused Levertov to reconsider her way of writing about war. In Vietnam, the three women met with delegates. They were introduced to soldiers and spoke with wounded men, women, and children, and they saw bombed hospitals and a fishing village where warships were shelled and set on fire.
In her diary from that historic trip, she wrote, “All that we have known, all we have been spreading among other people seems unreal when [compared] with actually seeing mothers sitting by bedside of double amputee & brain damaged [sic].” She wrote, “It seems to me that [hope, faith, clarity] comes out of a suffering we have yet to [experience].” Whereas Levertov’s poem “Tenebrae,” the poem of contention in Duncan’s letter, had come to her through the experience of seeing images in newspaper pages right next to the war news, in Vietnam, she began to recognize those poems as a kind of othering. The images she had conjured in her poems appeared to her now as half measures, mere fragments of a larger truth. The poems didn’t seem documentary in the fullest sense of the word.
In The Freeing of the Dust, published in 1975, she dedicated the poem “In Thai Binh (Peace) Province” to both Rukeyser and Hart. She wrote,
and a boy and small bird both
perched, relaxed, on a quietly grazing
buffalo. Peace within the
long war.
It is that life, unhurried, sure, persistent,
I must bring home when I try to bring
the war home.
Child, river, light.
In the poem, Levertov uses the image of a boy and a small bird on a buffalo as a kind of synecdoche, standing in for what she sees as an unhurried, peaceful way of life. She then re-fragments the image into its smallest parts—child, river, light—and offsets these, as if to protect these fragments as they are made ready and shipped for their long voyage back across the Pacific.
In the catalogue of these fragments, the human element and the natural elements are equally weighted, and the bisyllabic words and the repetition of the “i” sounds create an incantatory quality. The incantation becomes an urging of herself to embrace a new type of seeing—to witness not only the devastation of war dousing the pages of the newspaper, but also a way of living, of being, a quality of light, a refraction of water.
Through the atrocities of war, it is easy to lose sight of the child experiencing the responsibilities of childhood, the buffalo eating a mouthful of reeds, the bird resting, the river. But these are not residual. To overlook these is to obscure the macrocosm of this culture and its history. Much like the catalogue of ships in Book II of the Iliad, Levertov’s structure of parallelism closes as quickly as it opens. And though it is terse, the technique is striking in its ability to question her own approach to the poetry of war.
Much later, in Life in the Forest (1978), Candles in Babylon (1982), Oblique Prayers (1984), Breathing the Water (1987), A Door in the Hive (1989), and again in her posthumous volume This Great Unknowing (2000), Levertov took up the pain felt by trees, flowers, and animals directly affected by war. Levertov came to view the human as an increasingly destructive element within nature, like a parasitic wasp shaking and breaking that great web.
For example, The Life Around Us: Selected Poems on Nature (1997), one of the last collections she was alive to see published, was devoted to “the green world” and the calamitous effects of man-powered wars on that world. In the introduction to the volume, she wrote with great distress that the earth “is so threatened by our actions” that its hold on life is “as tenuous as our own, its fate as precarious.” Oil spills, deforestation, and the degradation of the biosphere are all part of a continuum of war that is inextricable from the human suffering brought on by wars. So much so that, for Levertov, any poem devoted to directing attention to social and ecological injustices is a kind of poetry of war. She wrote, “[f]or war is no longer (if it ever was) a matter of armed conflict only.”
Levertov’s third category of war poetry, in which she recognizes the importance of community, came to her most prominently in later years. Levertov had begun her political involvement in the antinuclear movement in the mid-seventies, following her painful divorce from Goodman in 1975 and the beginning of her short tenure at Tufts University. Genesis, her affinity group, operated under the Clamshell Alliance through nonviolent protests and teach-ins. Levertov called this way of protesting “discipline,” which stood in sharp contradiction to the more provocative methods she had deployed in the prior decade.
She later reflected, in an essay in Light Up the Cave, “How different an atmosphere from the fierce, bitching, trashing, ‘off the pig’-shouting demonstrations of the late 60s, early 70s!” She explained,
the disillusion that followed the assassination of Dr. King and Malcom X, our seeming impotence to stop the napalming and bombing in South East Asia, the Kent State Killings, the hunting down of the panthers—that disillusion and nihilistic rage that ensued could occur again. But the sense of inner, individual change and growth that characterized the nonviolence of the antinuclear movement does seem to me to promise more staying power.
She drew vigor and new life from this gentle approach to political action. Levertov reflected often on her political evolution, writing numerous essays on the subject and devoting many of her lectures and readings to documenting this transformation. When recalling where she had started as a young activist and where she was now, for Levertov, the journey was more important than the end point. The missteps and the faltering mattered as much as her ultimate renewal. In her poem “On the 32nd Anniversary of the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” she draws a red thread from her days in the Second World War through the nuclear crises of the late seventies. A thread of dashed hopes and rebuilding, only to have those hopes dashed again. She writes, as a plea, “something can yet / be salvaged upon the earth: / try, try to survive.”
At this stage of her career, Levertov portrays a more nuanced relationship with nature. She began to see how poems of comradeship in struggle can help communicate the necessity of mutual care. Whereas in her early poems, the natural world acted as a mise-en-scène, a sire, or an oracle alerted and alerting to the terrors of war, and in the poems of the Vietnam War, the natural world acted as a fraction of the larger picture of war, in these late poems, Levertov was able to see the natural world for what it really was and what it needed from us.
In “Watching Dark Circles,” from the collection Oblique Prayers, Levertov thinks through the effects of a horrific nuclear experiment called “Operation Crossroads,” which was conducted on laboratory animals, including pigs. These pigs were used in real historical experiments performed by an Army-Navy task force as stand-ins for humans. She writes,
Men are willing
to call the roasting of live pigs
a simulation of certain conditions. It is
not a simulation. The pigs (with their high-rated intelligence,
their uncanny precognition of disaster) are real,
their agony real agony …
Here, Levertov cares for pigs. She transfers nature to the page not as a colonized personification but as a self—with intellectual and emotional capacities, with real fears, laments, and expressions of pain.
During the last twenty years of her life, beginning with the publication of Life in the Forest (1978), Levertov underwent tremendous self-reflection. She began teaching at Stanford and moved to Palo Alto, where she stayed during the winter months. On the West Coast, she re-engrained herself in the Christian community, although it was very different from the one of her youth. She began embarking on what she later called a “do-it-yourself theology.” She prayed regularly and attended services at a number of churches: First Presbyterian in Palo Alto, several Episcopal churches in the Palo Alto area, and the Catholic chapel at the Stanford student union. In those services, she often took extensive notes on her consciousness. In her 1990 essay “Work That Enfaiths,” she clarified the close connection between works of art and works of faith. Both are a process—both are “a long swim through waters of unknown depth.”
That process of faith was not without its difficulties. Levertov asked herself repeatedly how she could reconcile the existence of God’s love, on the one hand, and the human’s evil capacity for war and destruction of the natural world on the other. Levertov’s biographer, Hollenberg, recognized in Levertov’s work “both the ache of chronic anxiety about the human potential to destroy the world and a persistent hope, rooted in a sense of mystery, that the ‘god or gods’ that ‘imagined us’ would ultimately stay our murderous hands.” Whereas Levertov’s green shadow once walked before her in nature to hear the whisper of the coming wars, that was no longer the voice she heard.
In those later years, the natural world stopped its quiet gestures. The animals, the trees, the flowers seemed to be barking, crying out, screaming at the tops of their lungs. Through the perceived silence of the mountain, a fire seethes in its depths. Their agony is real agony, as Levertov reminds us over and over again. And it is our responsibility—as humans, as readers, as poets—to care, to cease our wars and instead embrace the experience which feeds the mind’s vision and “moves / with beating wings / into and over / the page.”
Over the course of Levertov’s life, through all the wars she witnessed, she never stopped writing war poetry that could help bring about peace. And though she never fully believed in Duncan’s credo that “the role of the poet is not to oppose evil but to imagine it,” she did devise her own approach to engaging with war. For Levertov, poems praising the living earth could invigorate its protection. Poems of protest and poems that documented the state of war could awaken an urgency to act. Poems of comradeship in struggle could help convey the necessity of mutual care. Instead of providing us with a fixed vision of peace, Levertov imagined it as an action one must take, one stanza at a time.