Quote

A poet articulating the dreads and horrors of our time is necessary in order to make readers understand what is happening, really understand it, not just know about it but feel it: and should be accompanied by a willingness on the part of those who write it to take additional action towards stopping the great miseries which they record.

Denise Levertov

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Denise Levertov
Age: 74 †
Born: 1923
Born: October 24
Died: 1997
Died: December 20
Poet
Translator
Writer
Ilford
London
Priscilla D Levertoff
Priscilla Denise Levertoff
Priscilla Denise Levertov
Feel
Reader
Happenings
Miseries
Feels
Records
Happening
Horrors
Great
Understand
Misery
Accompanied
Writing
Write
Towards
Additional
Really
Action
Horror
Stopping
Make
Order
Record
Dread
Time
Part
Necessary
Willingness
Dreads
Take
Poet
Readers
Articulating

More quotes by Denise Levertov

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At Delphi I prayed to Apollo that he maintain in me the flame of the poem and I drank of the brackish spring there.
Denise Levertov
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Each part of speech a spark awaiting redemption, each a virtue, a power in abeyance.
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Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.
Denise Levertov
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Let the space under the first storey be dark, let the water lap the stone posts, and vivid green slime glimmer upon them let a boat be kept there.
Denise Levertov
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Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.
Denise Levertov
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The vast silence of Buddha overtakes and overrules the oncoming roar of tragic life that fills alleys and avenues it blocks the way of pedicabs, police, convoys.
Denise Levertov
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There is no savor more sweet, more salt than to be glad to be what, woman, and who, myself, I am.
Denise Levertov
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Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.
Denise Levertov
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Mediocrity is perhaps due not so much to lack of imagination as to lack of faith in the imagination, lack of the capacity for this abandon.
Denise Levertov
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The artist must create himself or be born again.
Denise Levertov
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my pleasure was in the strength of my back, in my noble shoulders, the cool smooth flesh cylinders of my arms.
Denise Levertov
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The fire in leaf and grass so green it seems each summer the last summer.
Denise Levertov
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Love is a landscape the long mountains define but don't shut off from the unseeable distance.
Denise Levertov
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Do you mistake me? I am speaking of living, of moving from one moment into the next, and into the one after, breathing death in the spring air.
Denise Levertov
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Teachers at all levels encourage the idea that you have to talk about things in order to understand them, because they wouldn't have jobs, otherwise. But it's phony, you know.
Denise Levertov
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Peace as a positive condition of society, not merely as an interim between wars, is something so unknown that it casts no images on the mind's screen.
Denise Levertov
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The world is not with us enough. O taste and see.
Denise Levertov
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There's in my mind a... turbulent moon-ridden girl or old woman, or both, dressed in opals and rags, feathers and torn taffeta, who knows strange songs but she is not kind.
Denise Levertov
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blue bead on the wick, there's that in me that burns and chills, blackening my heart with its soot, I think sometimes not Apollo heard me but a different god.
Denise Levertov
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Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.
Denise Levertov