ABSTRACT
Denise Levertov's place in American poetry is secured by alifetime exploring spiritual themes, a pilgrimage of poetry. In her first two decades of writing, she centered on the form and detail of inner experience, exploring in the ordinary large and small things of the world what she termed the "authentic," the "Marvelous Truth" ("Matins," The jacob's Ladder, 1961). From the mid-1960s on, her aesthetics of numinous presence was put under great pressure, for a poetry of the expressive self in moments of awareness could not bridge the public, political realities of societal and national upheaval. Yet she insistently explored a variety of forms in which to combine private reflection with a public moral language. Few poets have explored so intensely and written with so much insight and wisdom on the individual's encounter with the most profound matters of political and spiritual life.
