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Denise Levertov Quotes

1923–1997 England

Denise Levertov (24 October 1923 – 20 December 1997) was a British-American poet.

England
20th-century poets
Authors
Poets

Also known as: Levertov, Denise

Random Denise Levertov quote

35 quotes

Praise
the invisible sun burning beyond
the white cold sky, giving us
light and the chimney's shadow.

Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus (1981)

Acknowledgement, and celebration, of mystery probably constitutes the most consistent theme of my poetry from its very beginnings.

A Poets View (1984)

Poems present their testimony as circumstantial evidences, not as closing argument.

A Poets View (1984)

Fire he sang,
that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames.

A Tree Telling of Orpheus (1968)

I like to find
what's not found
at once, but lies within something of another nature,
in repose, distinct.

With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads (1960)

I am tired of 'the fine art of unhappiness'.

I would say that the imagination, which synergizes intellect, emotion and instinct, is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God.

A Poets View (1984)

I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.

Statement on poetics in The New American Poetry (1960)

He himself must be
the key, now, to the next door,
the next terrors of freedom and joy.

Oblique Prayers (1984)

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry. I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line.

O Taste and See : New Poems (1964)

The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see.

O Taste and See : New Poems (1964)

The wind, the birds,
do not sound poorer but clearer,
recalling our agony, and the way we danced.

A Tree Telling of Orpheus (1968)

There is a fence around the garden
but the gate stands open.

Footprints (1972)

Let Ariel learn
a blessing for Caliban
and Caliban drink dew from the lotus
open upon the waters.

Down through the tomb's inward arch
He has shouldered out into Limbo
to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber...

A Door in the Hive (1989)

And not till he saw the angel had left him,
alone and free to resume
the ecstatic, dangerous, wearisome roads of
what he had still to do,
not till then did he recognize
this was no dream.

Oblique Prayers (1984)

He told of journeys,
of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark,
of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day
deeper than roots ...

A Tree Telling of Orpheus (1968)

Leaps of nerve, heart —
cries of communion: if there is bliss,
it has
been already
and will be; out-
reaching, utterly.
Blind
to itself, flooded
with otherness.

Rain-diamonds, this winter morning, embellish the tangle of unpruned pear-tree twigs; each solitaire, placed, it appearrs, with considered judgement, bears the light beneath the rifted clouds — the indivisible shared out in endless abundance.

Sands of the Well (1994)

By dawn he was gone.
We have stood here since,
in our new life.
We have waited.
He does not return.

A Tree Telling of Orpheus (1968)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Denise Levertov (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.