ABSTRACT
As with all lyric poetry, the lines in Denise Levertov's poems seek to raise themselves from the page in a struggle towards transcendence. By the time of her 1984 book Oblique Prayers, this struggle becomes unself-consciously theological. 'God's in the dust / not sifted / out from confusion', she writes, offering an apologetics for her more confident essays into 'religious poetry' and putting forth a justification for her famously small and quotidian imagery like that of her High Modernist mentor and model, William Carlos Williams. Levertov's art may be more profoundly read if we consider it as an embodiment of Bergson's philosophy. There seems to be a low-grade Bergsonism running throughout the twentieth century, and it certainly felt in the work of the High Modernists, and particularly in the experimental poetics of Williams, Levertov's single most significant source. Levertov's work has embodied process thought from early on, and in a way has prepared the ground for her later theological explorations.
