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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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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
Faith
Much
Mediocrity
Abandon
Dues
Lack
Capacity
Perhaps
Imagination

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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 -
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Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak of our own doubts, while dubiously we mother man in his doubt!
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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.
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The AvowalAs swimmers dareto lie face to the skyand water bears them,as hawks rest upon airand air sustains themso would I learn to attain freefall, and floatinto Creator Spirit's deep embrace,knowing no effort earnsthat all-surrounding grace.
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I'll dig in into my days, having come here to live, not to visit. Grey is the price of neighboring with eagles, of knowing a mountain's vast presence, seen or unseen.
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Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.
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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.
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But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.
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What joy when the insouciant armadillo glances at us and doesn't quicken his trotting across the track into the palm brush. What is this joy? That no animal falters, but knows what it must do?
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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.
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Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.
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Each part of speech a spark awaiting redemption, each a virtue, a power in abeyance.
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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.
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I like to find what's not found at once, but lies within something of another nature, in repose, distinct.
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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.
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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.
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In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.
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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.
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Both art and faith are dependent on imagination both are ventures into the unknown.
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One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.
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