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“... The daughter​ of a schoolteacher from Wales and a Christianised Russian Jew, Denise Levertov was born in Essex and made her reputation in America writing poems in and about Mexico, Provence and North Vietnam. She was, one reviewer said, ‘incomparably the best poet of what is getting to be known as the new avant-garde’, and yet her radicalism was a matter of substance rather than style ...”

“... and of course the whole group of poets associated with Black Mountain College – Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan and Charles Olson. Of all these it was Charles Olson who engaged most directly and continuously with the implications of Pound’s poetics. The Maximus Poems can he read as a massive attempt to heal what Olson saw as ...”

“... What became​ of that wave of energy in the 1940s?’ Denise Levertov wondered in 1965, looking back on her place in Kenneth Rexroth’s 1947 anthology, New British Poets. ‘Many of the 1940s poets seem to have dropped right out of the scene.’ Was their ‘failure to develop’ their own fault, she wondered, or the result of a gigantic ‘failure of nerve’ in British publishing? In the manuscript of her lecture, a cancelled sentence names the missing; first on her list is Nicholas Moore ...”

“... of correspondents, along with Paul Blackburn, Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac, Louis Zukofsky and Denise Levertov. There are nearly three hundred letters in this selection, the majority of them to men. Apart from Levertov, a regular correspondent, the only women he seems to have written to are his mother, and his ...”

“... one of the most important artistic relationships of his life, a decades-long correspondence with Denise Levertov. By the end of the 1950s Duncan had already published several books, including a Selected Poems in 1959, but it was The Opening of the Field (1960) that marked his breakthrough as a poet. Convinced, with Pound, that in poetry ‘all ages are ...”

“... a whole lot of black and white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov. There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in ...”

“... himself, but there are also versions of individual poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Tomlinson. In the notes Weinberger has glossed allusions, and brought together, as my quotations have suggested, an illuminating set of comments by Paz himself. Paz’s recurring references are to Baudelaire and ...”

“... Adcock, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Elaine Feinstein are all variously represented, opening out the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties as a time of diversity and imaginative enterprise. One poet who ...”

“... and the 1960s, Helen Adam, Jane Bowles, Elise Cowen, Hettie Jones, Lenore Kandel, Joanne Kyger, Denise Levertov, Josephine Miles, Anne Waldman among them. Many of these women, identified by Joyce Johnson in her memoir as Minor Characters, are now major figures in postwar American letters. But as di Prima noted, ‘a lot of potentially great women ...”

“... to read and lecture. Friendships with contemporaries outside the institution – Hughes, Lowell, Denise Levertov – encouraged a more confessional mode, resulting in her first controversial collection, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, in 1963. Among Rich’s papers at Harvard is a letter from her father – copied in her mother’s hand – damning the ...”

“... he accepted it with Stendhalian calm, and it did not prevent him from promoting other poets, like Denise Levertov. In some ways, Rexroth remained a very regionally-minded man, as most anarchists are. He disliked the New York literary establishment, and the dislike was reciprocated; when, in the Forties, he decided to go east and conquer Greenwich ...”

“... picked up and moved to New York. Lucia sold children’s ponchos and lived in the same building as Denise Levertov and was happy – wasn’t she? – until Buddy showed up one night with ‘a bottle of brandy and four tickets to Acapulco’. That is what, in this world, we call a gesture, and Lucia Berlin was a person on whom gestures were not ...”

“... those who admired Dickinson’s work have been put off by the demands she places on the reader. Denise Levertov found something chilling about her command on the page, an ugliness in her aristocratic self-assurance: ‘You know, actually those dashes bother me,’ she wrote to Robert Duncan in 1961. ‘There’s something cold and perversely smug about ...”