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Each part of speech a spark awaiting redemption, each a virtue, a power in abeyance.

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
Part
Power
Abeyance
Awaiting
Spark
Sparks
Redemption
Speech
Virtue

More quotes by Denise Levertov

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The threat of world's end is the old threat.
Denise Levertov
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Both art and faith are dependent on imagination both are ventures into the unknown.
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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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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?
Denise Levertov
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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.
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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Love is a landscape the long mountains define but don't shut off from the unseeable distance.
Denise Levertov
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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.
Denise Levertov
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The world is not with us enough. O taste and see.
Denise Levertov
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In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.
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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Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.
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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I watch the clouds as I see them in pomp advancing, pursuing the fallen sun.
Denise Levertov
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Beespittle, droppings, hairs of beefur: all become honey. Virulent micro-organisms cannot survive in honey.
Denise Levertov
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An absolute patience. Trees stand up to their knees in fog. The fog slowly flows uphill. White cobwebs, the grass leaning where deer have looked for apples. The woods from brook to where the top of the hill looks over the fog, send up not one bird. So absolute, it is no other than happiness itself, a breathing too quiet to hear.
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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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
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Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak of our own doubts, while dubiously we mother man in his doubt!
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