“this need to dance / this need to kneel”: Denise Levertov and the Poetics of Faith

“this need to dance / this need to kneel”: Denise Levertov and the Poetics of Faith
edited by Michael P. Murphy and Melissa Bradshaw
Pickwick Publications, 2019; 242 pp., $29.00

Both long-time fans of Denise Levertov as well as the newly illumined will find something to love in this collection of essays from the 2015 Loyola University conference celebrating her work.

In the first of the two parts of the collection, six essayists explore Levertov’s trajectory as a poet whose work embodies faith, first as an agnostic encountering the transcendent in the everyday, then as a poetic witness engaged in political protest, and finally as an explicitly religious writer after her conversion to Roman Catholicism in the early 1980s.

The essay authors seem to agree in drawing Levertov’s development in these three stages. Although the poet’s work ran the gamut from agnosticism to Christian piety, from quotidian imagery to political outrage, these stages of her development, rather than being disjointed or oppositional, express a strong continuity in Levertov’s life and work. Each stage manifests a variation on her perennial themes of mystery and sacrament, transcendence and immanence.

Hailing from a variety of academic disciplines, the respective essayists take different angles to reach similar conclusions.

Preeminent Levertov scholar Albert Gelpi opens the anthology with an essay describing Levertov’s work as embodying faith even as an agnostic. While Levertov’s parents embraced familial legacies of Jewish-Christian faith, she was an agnostic when she began her career as a poet. Even then, as both Gelpi and fellow Levertov scholar, Cristina Gámez-Fernández, point out, Levertov’s work expresses encounter with the transcendent in the everyday and reveals imagination as “the perceptive organ” through which the poet is able to behold mystery and “experience God” (Levertov quoted in Gelpi, 36). For Levertov in all stages of her career, both the language of a poem and the poem itself are understood as sacrament, as an embodiment or incarnation of transcendent grace apprehended through imagination.

Gelpi and Gámez-Fernández see Levertov as a spiritual pilgrim throughout her journey from agnosticism to explicitly religious faith, and scholar Colby Dickinson sees Levertov’s sacramental imagination as prophetic. Dickinson paints poetry as a prophetic calling, as a spiritual vocation through which Levertov helped facilitate her own spiritual maturing. Gámez-Fernández traces the continuity in Levertov’s poetry over the decades of her career both in terms of themes and motifs and also down to the specific imagery and language echoed in various poems from multiple stages of her career. In Levertov’s work, Gámez-Fernández finds a consistent attention to embodied human experience, a focus on the transcendence in everyday objects, and a reverence for the natural world and for fellow pilgrims—both humans and other creatures.

For theologians Kevin Burke and Brent Little, Levertov’s doubt and struggle, even—or especially—during her agnostic stage recommend her as a model of faith for Christians, while her life itself serves as a text that can inform and illuminate theological discourse. Both Burke and Little identify a thread of ironic imagination that runs through Levertov’s work as she wrestles with facts held in tension with their contraries and especially with the fact of the incarnation of an ironic God, “a messy, undomesticated lamb” who is “bound to disrupt one’s life” (Little, 94).

As a counterbalance to “some degree of hagiographical fervor” among Levertov scholars (Wallace, 129), writer Mary Gordon points out both Levertov’s poetic virtues and also her possible vices. Gordon draws our attention to contrasts between specific lines and poems in Levertov’s work to observe variations in quality. In “Advent 1966” and “Tenebrae,” Gordon argues, Levertov’s political outrage brings her to elegance of form and nuance in imagery and language. At the same time, Gordon confronts the crudeness and lack of nuance in weaker passages as in “Life at War.” While she admires Levertov’s political outrage and maybe even her “public hissy fit on the subject of Language poetry” (100), Gordon objects to what she perceives as Levertov’s lack of honest anger with regard to her restrictions as a woman both as a poet in a male-dominated field and also in her personal relationships with men.

In Part 2 of the collection, seven essayists tease out some of the overarching themes of Levertov’s work and explore specific connections across disciplines and between individuals of note. The collection’s co-editor, Michael Murphy, begins this section with his essay, “Fragile Beauty,” a study of Levertov’s “eco-theological poetics,” which, he argues, is developed through paradox, namely, the “sustained synthesis of irreconcilable elements” (Levertov quoted in Murphy, 111–12). This concept of paradox harmonizes with the element of ironic imagination discussed by theologians Burke and Little in the previous section.

Scholars Cynthia Wallace and Chiyuma Elliott examine the influence of Simone Weil and John Donne, respectively, on Levertov’s work. While touching on multiple points of resonance between Weil and Levertov, Wallace highlights the centrality, for both writers, of sacramental communion proceeding from attention. In her essay, “The End: Devotional Assertions, Religious Attention, and Denise Levertov’s Poetics of Closure,” Elliott establishes that Levertov “thought deeply and deliberately about Donne’s work” (142), and the essayist applies David Marno’s interpretation of the endings of Donne’s Holy Sonnets to gain a deeper understanding of Levertov’s two poems, “Daily Bread” and “To the Reader.”

Literary critic Elisabeth Joyce finds overlap between Levertov’s poetic process as described in Levertov’s essay, “Some Notes on Organic Form,” and Jean-Luc Marion’s concept of “saturated phenomenon,” derived from his reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Joyce analyzes Levertov’s elegiac “Olga Poems” to understand how this kind of transcendent phenomenon breaks forth into poetic language and attains mystical heights.

José Rodríguez Herrera builds a mosaic of Levertov’s connections and influences. Pulling in tesserae from her Judeo-Christian upbringing to her ekphrastic poems, he investigates links between Levertov’s work and her father’s Hasidic heritage, the medieval legend of the Wandering Jew, and Chagall’s painting, Over Vitebsk—as well as links between the mystical stories of Pegasus and Alpheus, the motif of “The Well” in Levertov’s work, the story of Anne Sullivan and Hellen Keller, and the maternal influence of Beatrice Levertoff. Rodríguez Herrera also contrasts Levertov’s incarnational imagination with the “hermetic theosophy” of her mentor, Robert Duncan (199). Drawing on similarities in tone between Caravaggio’s paintings and Levertov’s work, and especially on her ekphrastic poem, “The Servant-Girl at Emmaus (A Painting by Velázquez),” Rodríguez Herrera shows how her work captures a “poetics of faith and the imagination” that traces back to her paternal and maternal influences (202).

Finally, two artists share personal reflections on Levertov and her influence on their work. Photographer Julia D. E. Prinz examines the relationship between Levertov and photographer Mary Randlett and reflects on the influence of these two artists on her own vocation as a photographer as she includes photos from both Randlett and herself throughout her essay. Similarly, poet Angela Alaimo O’Donnell shares how Levertov’s work decisively shaped her own trajectory as a writer, and she offers four of her poems in response to Levertov’s “Annunciation.”

In the examination of the many “separate and distinct elements” in Levertov’s life and work, readers perceive that the synthesis and “potent whole” is more than “the summation of those parts alone” (Joyce, 153). The thirteen essayists in this collection offer deeper insight and greater appreciation for both Denise Levertov and her work. Further, they offer artists of any medium the opportunity to reinvigorate their vision of their work as spiritual vocation by contemplating Levertov’s generous love, tenacious piety, and sacramental imagination. Through the stages of her life and work, Levertov offers us a model of how to wrestle with doubt and suffering while clinging to faith in mystery that incarnates before us in every “shimmering/of wind in the blue leaves,” in the “flood of stillness/widening the lake of sky.” With the collection’s authors, we can hang onto “Levertov’s acute phenomenological observations from the brink of her colons” (Burke, 77). In the collection’s titular lines from the poem, “Of Being,” Levertov teaches us the proper response to happiness that seems provisional when faced with “the looming presences” of “great suffering, great fear”: the struggle of faith, for artist and non-artist alike, is to realize the “need to dance, this need to kneel:/this mystery” (75).