The Poet's "Caressive Sight": Denise Levertov's Transactions with Nature

• Authors: Małgorzata Poks
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The scientific consciousness which broke with the holistic perception of life is credited with "unweaving the rainbow," or disenchanting the world. No longer perceived as sacred, the non-human world of plants and animals became a site of struggle for domination and mastery in implementing humankind's supposedly divine mandate to subdue the earth. The nature poetry of Denise Levertov is an attempt to reverse this trend, reaffirm the sense of wonder inherent in the world around us, and reclaim some "holy presence" for the modern sensibility. Her exploratory poetics witnesses to a sense of relationship existing between all creatures, both human and non-human. This article traces Levertov's "transactions with nature" and her evolving spirituality, inscribing her poetry within the space of alternative-or romantic-modernity, one that dismantles the separation paradigm. My intention throughout was to trace the way to a religiously defined faith of a person raised in the modernist climate of suspicion, but keenly attentive to spiritual implications of beauty and open to the epiphanies of everyday.

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
• Year: 2011
• Volume: 1
• Pages: 145-152

Dates

published

2011-01-01

online

2011-11-23

Contributors

author

Małgorzata Poks

• English Teacher Training College, Sosnowiec

References

• Levertov, Denise. The Life Around Us. New York: New Directions, 1997.
• Levertov, Denise. New and Selected Essays. New York: New Directions, 1992.
• Levertov, Denise. Selected Poems. Ed. Paul E. Lacey. New York: New Directions, 2002.
• Mooney, Edward F. Rev. of Kierkegaard's Category of Repetition, by Niles Eriksen. Kierkegaard Studies Monograph 5. New York: de Gruyter, 2000. Søeren Kierkegaard Newsletter 42. Sept. 2001. Web. 15 Sept. 2007.
• Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of a Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10231-011-0011-x