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Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.
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
Mean
Sleepers
Insofar
Awaken
Shock
Function
Poetry
Means
Social
More quotes by Denise Levertov
Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak of our own doubts, while dubiously we mother man in his doubt!
Denise Levertov
Love is a landscape the long mountains define but don't shut off from the unseeable distance.
Denise Levertov
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
Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.
Denise Levertov
Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.
Denise Levertov
Wear scarlet! Tear the green lemons off the tree! I don't want to forget who I am, what has burned in me, and hang limp and clean, an empty dress -
Denise Levertov
Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.
Denise Levertov
Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.
Denise Levertov
And our dreams, with what frivolity we have pared them like toenails, clipped them like ends of split hair.
Denise Levertov
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
You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.
Denise Levertov
Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.
Denise Levertov
slowly the pale dew-beads of light lapped up from flowers can thicken, darken to gold: honey of the human.
Denise Levertov
Both art and faith are dependent on imagination both are ventures into the unknown.
Denise Levertov
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
our nerve filaments twitch with its presence day and night, nothing we say has not the husky phlegm of it in the saying, nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.
Denise Levertov
I like to find what's not found at once, but lies within something of another nature, in repose, distinct.
Denise Levertov
I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the life of the poem.
Denise Levertov
The artist must create himself or be born again.
Denise Levertov
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