Denise Levertov

(1923 - 1997)

The daughter of a Welsh mother and a Russian Jewish father, Denise Levertov left England in 1948 and moved to the United States, where she became poetry editor for The Nation and Mother Jones. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, she and her husband worked with antinuclear and antiwar groups, but Levertov resisted being labeled a protest poet. “I would like to make,” she wrote in a 1958 collection, “poems direct as what the birds said, / hard as a floor, sound as a bench, / mysterious as the silence when the tailor / would pause with his needle in the air.”