New and Selected Essays

by Denise Levertov

  At times it seems as if it were his own brilliant intellect he is struggling to keep from domination of his art—beating not a dead horse but a horse that does not exist in me, or in others about whose poetry he wrote. In 1956, writing from a small village in Majorca, wondering if he and Jess can afford to travel to London at Christmas time (their budget was $100 a month) he spoke of:

  … craving the society of English speech. My notebooks are becoming deformed by the “ideas” which ordinarily 1 throw away into talk, invaluable talk for a head like mine that no waste basket could keep clean for a poem. I can more than understand dear (old Coleridge who grew up to be a boring machine of talk; I can fear for my own poor soul. And, isolated from the city of idle chatter, here my head fills up, painfully, with insistent IMPORTANT things-to-say. I toss at night, spring out of bed to sit for hours, crouched over a candle, writing out—ideas, ideas, ideas. Solutions for the universe, or metaphysics of poetry, or poetics of living. Nor does my reading matter help—I have deserted Cocteau for a while because his ratiocination was perhaps the contagion; and the Zohar which irritates the cerebral automatism. Calling up, too, conflicts of poetry’s—impulses toward extravagant fantasy, my attempt to reawaken the “romantic” allegiances in myself, to Poe, or Coleridge, or Blake, are inhibited by a “modern” consciousness; I grow appalled at the diffusion of the concrete….

  And in 1958:

  Sometimes when I am most disconsolate about what I am working at, and most uneasy about the particular “exaltations” that may not be free outflowing of imagination and desire but excited compulsions instead … I feel guilty before the ever present substantial mode of your work.

  But of course, it was more than an overactive intellect that he had to contend with; the struggle was often with the sheer complexity of vision. His cross-eyes saw deep and far—and it is part of the artist’s honor not to reduce the intricate, the multitudinous, multifarious, to a neat simplicity. In 1961 he wrote:

  It’s the most disheartening thing I find myself doing in this H.D. study, trying to win her her just literary place—and what I find (when I reflect on it) is that I lose heart (I mean I get that sinking feeling in my heart and lungs, I guess it is, as if I had played it false). I know I can’t just avoid this playing it false—you know, direct sentences like sound bridges from good solid island to good solid island; and contrive thought lines like pipe lines to conduct those few clear streams—because the bog is the bog [he has previously written of “the bog I get into with prose”] and I really want to discover it on its own terms, [my italics] which must be the naturalist’s terms…. That damned bog would have to be drained and filled in to be worth a thing, but it is a paradise for the happy frog-lover, or swamp-grass enthusiast—and in its most rank and treacherous backwaters a teeming world of life for the biologist….

  Instances of particular changes made in poems in progress (and here I return to the interwoven theme of revision) occur in many letters, following poems sent earlier. The mind’s bog was fully inhabited by very exact, green, jewel-eyed frogs. Here are two typical examples:

  Nov. 29, 1960

  Dear Denny, That Risk!—how hard it seems for me to come down to cases there. This time it is not the wording (tho I did alter “simple” to “domestic” in “turning the mind from domestic pleasure”) but what necessitated my redoing the whole 3 pages was just the annoying fact that I had phrased certain lines wrong—against my ear. I never did read it “not luck but the way it falls choose/for her, lots” etc., which would mean either an odd stress of the phrase on “for” or a stress I didn’t mean on “her.” I was reading it from the first “choose for her” with the stress of the phrase on “choose”; and that terminal pitch heightening “falls” in the line before. And again: What did I think I was hearing when I divided “I had not the means/to buy the vase” or whatever—was it?—worse! “I had not the means to buy/the vase” etc.? Anyway, here I was going on like any hack academic of the automatic line-breaking school … not listening to the cadence of the thing. My cadence, my care, is changing perhaps too—and I was notating this from old habits contrary to the actual music.

  Or in March 1963 he gives the following revisions for “Structure of Rime XXI”:

  “solitude” for “loneliness” … “A depresst key” for “a touched string”—a depresst key is what it actually is (when the sympathetic sound rings) and also because both “depresst” and “key” refer to the substrata of the poem.

  “steps of wood” = notes of the scale on a xylophone …

  There are also the occasional suggestions for revision—or for more comprehensive change—of my own work (for until the late sixties we probably exchanged manuscripts of most of what we wrote). Sometimes his criticism was deeply instructive; of this the most telling instance concerns a 1962 poem in which I had overextended my feelings. Hearing that a painter we both knew (but who was not a close friend of mine, rather a friendly acquaintance whose work had given me great pleasure) had leukemia or some form of cancer, I plunged, as it were, into an ode that was almost a premature elegy. An image from one of his paintings had already appeared in another poem of mine—Clouds”—which Duncan particularly liked. In his criticism of this new poem he showed me how the emotional measure of the first (which dealt with matters “proved upon my pulses,” among which the remembrance of clouds he had painted “… as I see them—/rising/urgently, roseate in the/mounting of somber power”—“surging/in evening haste over hermetic grim walls” entered naturally, although the painter as a person played no part in the poem) was just. Whereas in the new poem, focussing with emotional intensity upon an individual who was not in fact anywhere close to the center of my life, however much his paintings had moved me, the measure was false. Although I thought (and looking it over now, still think) the poem has some good parts, I was throughly convinced, and shall never publish it. It was a lesson which, like all valuable lessons, had applicability not only to the particular occasion; and one which has intimately to do with the ideogram Ezra Pound has made familiar to us—the concept of integrity embodied in the sign-picture of “a man standing by his word.”

  There were other occasions, though, when I paid no attention to Robert’s criticism because he was misreading. For example, reading my prose “Note on the Imagination” in 1959, he speaks of,

  distrusting its discrimination (that just this is imination and that—“the feared Hoffmanesque blank—the possible monster or stranger ”—was Fancy), but wholly going along with the heart of the matter: the seed pearls of summer fog in Tess’s hair, and the network of mist diamonds in your hair. But the actual distinction between the expected and the surprising real thing here (and taking as another term the factor of your “usual face-in-the-mirror”) is the contrived (the work of Fancy) the remembered (how you rightly [say] “at no time is it hard to call up scenes to the mind’s eye”—where I take it these are remembered) and the presented. But you see, if the horrible, the ugly, the very feard commonplace of Hoffman and Poe had been the “presented thing” it would have been “of the imagination” as much as the delightful image….

  … The evaluation of Fancy and Imagination gets mixed up with the description. All these terms of seeing: vision, insight, phantasm, epiphany, it “looks-like,” image, perception, sight, “second-sight,” illusion, appearance, it “appears-to-be,” mere show, showing forth … where trust and mistrust of our eyes varies. However we trust or mistrust the truth, necessity, intent etc. of what is seen (and what manifests itself out of the depths through us): we can’t make the choice between monster as fancy and the crown-of-dew as imagination.

  Here the disagreement is substantial, for the very point I was trying to make concerned the way in which the active imagination illuminates common experience, and not by mere memory but by supplying new detail we recognize as authentic. By common experience I mean that which conforms to or expresses what we share as “laws of Nature.” Hoffman’s fantasies, known to me since childhood,
had given me pleasure because they were “romantic” in the vernacular sense (and my edition had attractive illustrations) but they did not illumine experience, did not “increase the sense of living, of being alive,” to use Wallace Stevens’s phrase. In the “Adagia” Stevens says that “To be at the end of reality is not to be at the beginning of imagination, but to be at the end of both.” To me—then and now—any kind of “sci fi,” any presentation of what does not partake of natural laws we all experience, such as gravity and mortality, is only a work of imagination if it is dealing symbolically with psychic truth, with soul-story, as myth, fairytales, and sometimes allegory, do. Duncan continues:

  Jess suggests it’s not a matter of either/or (in which Fancy represented a lesser order and Imagination a higher order …) but of two operations or faculties. Shakespeare is rich in both imagination and fancy … where Ezra Pound totally excludes or lacks fancy…. George MacDonald [spoke] of “works of Fancy and Imagination.” But I think he means playful and serious. Sometimes we use the word “fancy” to mean trivial; but that surely does injustice to Shelley’s landscapes or Beddoes’ Skeleton’s Songs or the description of Cleopatra’s barge that gives speech to Shakespeare’s sensual fancy.

  And here I think the difference of views is semantic. For I indeed would attach the words “playful” and sometimes “trivial” and frequently “contrived” or “thought-up,” to the term fancy, and for the instances cited in Shelley or Beddoes, would employ the term fantasy. The description of Cleopatra’s barge is neither fancy nor fantasy but the rhetoric of enthusiasm accurately evolving intense sensuous experience: an act of imagination. Fantasy does seem to me one of the functions of the imagination, subordinate to the greater faculty’s deeper needs—so that “In a cowslip’s bell I lie” and other evocations of faery in the Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, are delicate specifics, supplied by the power of fantasizing, for the more precise presentation of an imagined, not fancied or fantasied, world that we can apprehend as “serious”—having symbolic reality—even while we are entertained by its delightfulness and fun. The more significant divergence of opinion concerns “the presented thing,” as Duncan called it—for there he seems to claim a value for the very fact of presentation, as if every image summoned up into some form of art had thereby its justification; a point of view he certainly did not, does not, adhere to, and yet—perhaps, again, just because he has had always so to contend with his own contentiousness and tendency to be extremely judgmental—which he does seem sometimes to propound, almost reflexively. “What I do,” he wrote in January ’61:

  —in that letter regarding your essay on Imagination, or yesterday in response to your letter and the reply to——’s piece … is to contend. And it obscures perhaps just the fact that I am contending my own agreements often…. Aie! … I shall never be without and must work from those “irritable reachings after fact and reason” that must have haunted Keats too—

  What Duncan says here seems, unfortunately, to be manifested in this very statement, which assumes without due warrant that just because Keats saw in Coleridge that restless, irritable reaching, he was himself subject to it. Yet, however contentious, Duncan is often self-critical in these letters—as above, or as when he speaks (Sept. 1964) of “my … ’moralizing,‘ which makes writing critically such a chore, for I must vomit up my strong puritanical attacking drive…. this attacking in others what one fears to attack in oneself….” And in the midst of arguments he was often generous enough to combine self-criticism, or at least an objective self-definition, with beautiful examples of his opponent’s point of view—for instance, in the Oct. 1959 letter already referred to, discussing Fancy and Imagination, he says,

  Jess said an image he particularly remembers from Tess is stars reflected in puddles of water where cows have left hoof tracks—But, you know, I think I am so eager for “concept” that I lose those details. Or, more exactly—that my “concept” lacks details often. For, where you or Jess bring my attention back to the “little fog” intenser “amid the prevailing one” or the star in the cowtracked puddle: the presence of Tess and Angel leaps up…. But for me it’s not the perceived verity (your seed pearls of summer fog from Tess; or Madeline Gleason years ago to demonstrate the genius of imagination chose a perceived verity from Dante where the eyes of the sodomites turn and:

  e si ver noi aguzzavan le ciglia,

  come vecchio sartor fa nella cruna.

  “towards us sharpened their vision, as an aged tailor does at the eye of his needle”) I am drawn by the conceptual imagination rather than by the perceptual imagination….

  There were other times when Robert objected to some particular word in a poem of mine not in a way that instructed me but rather seemed due to his having missed a meaning. He himself was aware of that. In October 1966 he writes:

  And especially with you, I have made free to worry poems when there would arise some feeling of a possible form wanted as I read. Sometimes, as in your questionings of the pendent of Passages 2, such queries are most pertinent to the actual intent of the poem. And I think that even seemingly pointless dissents from the realized poem arise because along the line of reasoning a formal apprehension, vague but demanding, has arisen that differs from the author’s form. In a mistaken reading, this will arise because I want to use the matter of the poem to write my own “Denise Levertov” poem. Crucially astray.

  He wanted me to change an image of grief denied, dismissed, and ignored, in which I spoke of “Always denial. Grief in the morning, washed away / in coffee, crumbled to a dozen errands between/busy fingers” to “dunked” or “soaked” in coffee, not understanding that I meant it was washed away, obliterated; the “errands,” the “busy fingers,” and whatever other images of the poem all being manifestations of a turning away, a refusal to confront grief.*

  The attribution to others of his own intentions, concerns, or hauntings, an unfortunate spin-off of his inner contentions, occasioned another type of misreading—a reading-into, a suspicion of nonexistent complex motives that obstructs his full comprehension of what does exist. “What is going on,” he writes in July 1966, “in your:

  still turns without surprise, with mere regret

  to the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk

  runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies,

  transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp-fragments,

  implosion of skinned penises into carcass-gulleys*

  —the words in their lines are the clotted mass of some operation … having what root in you I wonder? Striving to find place in a story beyond the immediate.

  In this comment of his I find, sadly, that the “irritable reaching” stretches beyond “fact and reason” to search out complications for which there is no evidence. He misses the obvious. Having listed the lovely attributes of humankind, I proceeded, anguished at the thought of the war, to list the destruction of those very attributes—the violence perpetrated by humans upon each other. Because I believed that “we are members one of another” I considered myself morally obliged to attempt to contemplate, however much it hurt to do so, just what that violence can be. I forced myself to envision, in the process of writing, instances of it (drawing in part on material supplied by the Medical Committee for Human Rights or similar accounts; and elaborating from that into harsh language-sounds). There was no need to look for “what was going on” in me, “from what root” such images came—one had only to look at the violation of Vietnam. And from the misreading of this very poem stemmed, ultimately, the loss of mutual confidence that caused our correspondence to end—or to lapse at least—in the early seventies. But Duncan had conscious justification for such misreadings. In a 1967 interview of which he sent me a transcript he expounded it in terms of what the writer himself must do as reader of his own poem-in-process—but it is clearly what he was doing as a reader of my (and others’) poems also:

  The poet must search and research, wonder about, consult the meaning of [t
he poem’s] event. Here, to read means to dig, to let the forces of the poem work in us. Many poets don’t read. For instance, take an awfully good poet like Robert Frost; while he writes a poem, he takes it as an expression of something he has felt and thought. He does not read further. It does not seem to be happening to him but coming out of him. Readers too who want to be entertained by [or] to entertain the ideas of a writer will resent taking such writing as evidence of the Real and protest against our “reading into” poems, even as many protest the Freudians reading meanings into life that are not there. The writer, following images and meanings which arise along lines of a melody or along lines of rhythms and impulses, experiences the poem as an immediate reality. … I am consciously and attentively at work in writing—here 1 am like any reader. But I ask further, what is this saying? What does it mean that this is happening here like this?

  This statement, as always with Duncan, contains, it seems to me, a valuable reminder of how closely writers must see what they do, to be responsible for it; and of how readers, similarly, should not be content with the superficial, the face value of a poem. But unfortunately, though his “digging for meanings” results in many felicities and resonances in his own work, the method often makes him a poor reader of others, a reader so intent upon shadow that he rejects, or fails to see, substance.