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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
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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
Life
Lines
Functioning
Space
Muscle
Living
Muscles
Part
Poem
Body
Essential
Every
Essentials
Believe
Function
Pore
Way
Broken
Comma
More quotes by Denise Levertov
Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.
Denise Levertov
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
And our dreams, with what frivolity we have pared them like toenails, clipped them like ends of split hair.
Denise Levertov
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.
Denise Levertov
The threat of world's end is the old threat.
Denise Levertov
The fire in leaf and grass so green it seems each summer the last summer.
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
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
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
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
In June the bush we call alder was heavy, listless, its leaves studded with galls, growing wherever we didn't want it.
Denise Levertov
The world is not with us enough. O taste and see.
Denise Levertov
Praise the invisible sun burning beyond the white cold sky, giving us light and the chimney's shadow.
Denise Levertov
Images split the truth in fractions.
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
Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon.
Denise Levertov
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
Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.
Denise Levertov
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
Beespittle, droppings, hairs of beefur: all become honey. Virulent micro-organisms cannot survive in honey.
Denise Levertov