Linguistic versus organic, sfumato versus chiaroscuro: some aesthetic differences between Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan.

Herrera, Jose Rodriguez

THE publication of The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov has brought to the light a record of great historical, poetic, and personal interest. Through the numerous letters that comprise this extraordinary correspondence, the reader can enjoy a privileged and unique perspective on what was going on in the arts and politics in America during the second half of the twentieth century. As Adrienne Rich points out in "Poetic Dialogue," a legacy of this value was possible thanks to a cheap, reliable, and highly efficient U.S. Postal Service. Letters would go back and forth from East Coast to West Coast (where Levertov and Duncan lived respectively) in just a matter of two or three days. In this way, they knew that they could use the letters as a medium to preserve a fellowship based, among many other factors, on a mutual admiration and love for each other's work.

This voluminous correspondence, which spans more than three decades of their lives (the first letter dates from the beginnings of June, 1953), has few parallels among other correspondences between fellow poets. For one thing, they confronted everything in these letters: from politics to poetry, from preferences and dislikes concerning other writers to direct comments about each other's work, from references to their familiar lives to transcriptions of their own dreams. But, above all, in their correspondence they tried to articulate their ethical and aesthetic stances vis-a-vis the times in which they were living. And they did so, engaging in an intense dialogue over a series of pressing issues that were demanding of them a sound poetic response. Moreover, in articulating their differences about these themes, they were also exploring the possibilities that the new poetics offered them while, at the same time, opening it to a multiplicity of discourses.

In his excellent introduction to the letters, Albert Gelpi argues that the series of strong contentions which ultimately ruptured their friendship had an origin in their different upbringings. In this essay, I would like to explore some of their different aesthetic configurations related to composition and the imagination and show that these underlying differences were also at the basis of their final split.

THESE aesthetic differences were present from the start of their correspondence. In his first letter to Levertov, Duncan enclosed a poem titled "Letters for Denise Levertov: An A Muse ment." The punning in the title and the hermetic content of the poem turned into the vehicle of a misunderstanding. Levertov, who was still uninstructed in Duncan's taste for semantic tensions and verbal slippages, misread the poem as a slur against her work. For example, one of the sections that Levertov completely misapprehended was the one in which Duncan wrote about the "effort" of composing in words:

 A great effort, straining, breaking up
 all the melodic line (the lyric
 strain?) Dont
 hand me that old line we say
 You dont know what yet saying.

As Levertov would acknowledge many years later in her essay, "Some Duncan Letters--A Memoir and a Critical Tribute," "when the letter spoke of 'a great effort, straining, breaking up all the melodic line,' I supposed the writer was complaining" (200). So, Levertov took as a complaint what, as we shall see below, Duncan meant as a recognition.

Another part of the poem that Levertov misinterpreted as an accusation against her work was the series of enumerations headed by what Duncan called a "list of imaginary sounds":

 8. a fake cigar
 9. papers
 10. a holey shawl
 11. the addition of
 the unplanned for
 interruption: a
 flavor stinking coffee
 pot (how to brew
 another cup in
 that Marianne Moore, Pound,
 Williams, H.D., Stein, Zukofsky,
 Bunting, S. J. Perse, surrealist
 Dada staind pot)
 12. A table set for breakfast.
 A morning lang
 wuage--ai ai wailing
 the failing.

Levertov misread these lines as a derisive remark on her work, "apparently accusing it of brewing poems like 'stinking coffee' in a 'staind pot'" (New and Selected Essays 200). Her immediate reaction was to forward Duncan a swift letter enquiring whether he was attacking her for lack of originality: "is it possible," she wondered, "that the initials you signed with R.D., stand for Robert Duncan? You don't sound like him!" (New and Selected Essays 202).

Dismayed by her defensive reaction, Duncan responded with an explanatory letter in which he tried to unravel her numerous misinterpretations of the poem. In this letter, he explained that "straining" meant "tensions in meanings" and that he had used the word "effort" because Confucius esteemed it as one of the three virtues in life: "so--the 'strain'--to acclaim the strain itself; the I can hardly do it so easily. 'No more difficult than walking / this talking' But walking is (this complicated 'learnd' motion of muscles) is inherently 'difficult.' The conscious mind wld. stumble" (Bertholf and Gelpi 5).

As far as the "flavor stinking coffee/pot" was concerned, Duncan explained that he was actually inviting her to take delight with him in the "dismay / delight of origins--what most excites me." And he argued further: "My titles now for volumes of poetry are: IMITATIONS, and DERIVATIONS. 'originality' is NOT either interesting or available to me" (Bertholf and Gelpi 5).

As a "literary" poet, Duncan envisioned poetry as an open field of influences from which the poet could borrow and imitate at ease. Within the margins of this vast field, imitations and derivations were not misappropriations or symptoms of creative stagnation, but, much on the contrary, acts of communion with other poets sharing the same literary tradition; and by means of his letter-poem, Duncan was inviting Levertov to join this large breakfast table of poetry and relish it in all its flavors.

Yet, what seems also clear, after Duncan's long series of explanations, is that his message was totally lost to a, by then, young Postromantic Levertov, who was at pains to decipher the meanings behind some of Duncan's polyvalent signifiers. I would like to take this first awkward, and apparently banal misunderstanding as one evidence of their different aesthetic formations at that time; whereas Duncan was rather prone to using signifiers charged with acoustic values and defying monologic interpretation, Levertov had always had an inclination to, as she would confess, "most often choose the word that 'limits direction'" (New and Selected Essays 212). This difference would later translate into two divergent modes of composition, a linguistic mode and an organic mode. In a letter of May, 1963, written after he had read one of Levertov's first lectures on organic form, Duncan differentiates linguistic from organic poetry whilst personally adhering to the linguistic variant. The linguistic artist, as he defines it in the letter, must be "true to what is happening in the syntax as another man might be true to what he sees or feels" (Bertholf and Gelpi 408). Levertov, on the other hand, defined herself, from then onwards, as an organic poet, a mode which she would explain and develop in an essay published two years later.

Going back to those first letters, however, Duncan was left no choice but to end his explanatory letter expressing his sense of befuddlement for what had happened: "I write you 'it'; some of the figures (and rips) in the carpet and you find it not 'the least like Duncan.' Can misapprehensions be greater" (Bertholf and Gelpi 6). As if his sentence were premonitory, a series of contentious misapprehensions would start to ruffle their friendship in later years. More concretely, these "greater" misapprehensions would make their appearance at the end of the 1960s and beginnings of the 1970s, just when the Vietnam war was summoning them to redefine their ethical and aesthetic convictions in poems, letters, public and private life. Having failed to compromise on a common poetic response, they found themselves in bitter and relentless confrontation. This time, however, it was Levertov who accused Duncan of making "wilful misapprehensions" of her poems: "your letters are full of them ... wilful because the misapprehensions are based on prejudices, opinionated preconceptions, and need to make things fit with your projections" (Bertholf and Gelpi 674). Why did so many misapprehensions take place, and with such force, between two fellow poets who considered themselves like two Siamese souls? As I would like to argue, Levertov and Duncan had developed different aesthetics which determined their views about how to realize the truth of the conflict in the composition of the poem. Despite the many correspondences in the shaping of their literary lineage, and the many parallels in the development of their careers, there was still an underlying mesh of differences which, though unacknowledged, was in the end too strong to salvage their friendship.

BOTH Levertov and Duncan started their careers at a highly congenial time for poetic innovation. They were privileged enough to feel in short order the effects of the powerful and beneficial influence of Olson's essay on "Projective Verse." Among its many positive effects, Olson's new poetic proposals served to project further William Carlos Williams's poetics of the vernacular rhythms whilst opening the field of poetic creativity to the new generations.

As an active member of the Black Mountain School, Duncan had firsthand knowledge of these new poetic discoveries. He was one of the first to see the numerous advantages Olson's new poetics offered to poets. For someone like Duncan, a poet of such vast scholarly knowledge, the new poetics offered the large and open field he needed to range in.

The case of Levertov was, however, rather different. Though Donald Allen's The New American Poetry grouped her together with the major figures of the Black Mountain School, she, as Allen correctly adds in his prefatory note to the anthology, "had no connection with the college" (xii). The only criterion for classification was that she had published some poems in Cid Corman's Origin and Black Mountain Review.

But though Levertov never was physically at Black Mountain College, she had been corresponding with Robert Creeley and Duncan and was made privy to what they were trying to do there. In this way, Olson's "Projective Verse" soon reached her, influencing her new views concerning poetic composition and influencing the course of her poetry in the years to come.

Although scarcely any critical consideration has been given to the practical effects of "Projective Verse" on Levertov's poetry, her assimilation and translation into verse of Olson's theories was certainly one of the most notable breakthroughs in her career. Levertov had the privilege of being among the first ones to receive quite direct information about the contents of "Projective Verse" from the conversations she had with Creeley soon after it was first published. As she herself recognized, she was deeply enriched by discussions with Creeley over "Projective Verse" (New and Selected Essays 200). Olson's "ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION" influenced her idea of poetic writing as "a process of discovery," a seeking out of the inherent form peculiar to each experience, scoring in the lines of the poem the process of interconnected perceptions as apprehended in the mind. One example that shows the concrete effects Olson's theory of interconnected perceptions had on Levertov is her precise use of line-break in the poem. Levertov valued line-break as a "precision tool" for designing on the page "the process of thinking/feeling, feeling/thinking" by means of which one specific perception interconnects with the immediately following perception, recording even "the slight (but meaningful) hesitations between word and word that are characteristic of the mind's dance among perceptions" (New and Selected Essays 79).

Levertov saw in these new poetic proposals a way to compose and modulate more freely. So it was rather soon that she began to assimilate and apply them to her own poems. But Levertov was also a poet of centrifugal displacements, and thus she felt she had to revise some of Olson's tenets to make them adjust to her personal aesthetic configuration. For instance, she had more than purely incidental reservations about some of Olson's poetic formulations, Olson's breath theory being just one of them. Whereas Olson put pulmonary capacity first as a reliable verse metronome, Levertov thought that line length should be determined not by a purely physiological capacity (what she saw as tainted by Olson's masculinism) but by her "cadences of perception," each line of the poem being the visual score of the process of feeling/thinking at the moment of composition.

One subtler, yet in the long run more determinant, poetic reformulation had to do with the Black Mountain maxim about the interactions between form and content. It was at the Vancouver Poetry Festival of 1963, a highly resonant poetic forum, that she partially reformulated Creeley's "FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT" included in Olson's "Projective Verse," into a slightly different "form is never more than a revelation of content." This formula was more suited to her conception of poetry as an organic form, which, as she defined in her essay "Some Notes on Organic Form," was "a method of apperception, i.e., of recognizing what we perceive, and is based on an intuition of an order, a form beyond forms, in which forms partake, and of which man's creative works are analogies, resemblances, natural allegories" (The Poet in the World 7).

As two poets of a strong mystic configuration, Levertov and Duncan believed in the existence of a supreme form, a "form beyond forms," which was incarnated in natural objects. They also agreed that there had to be an intimate and dynamic interaction between the form and the content of the poem. However, they diverged over how to go about apprehending that supreme form in and through the poem.

They differed mainly over the constituents and dynamisms at work in the process of composition. Their dissimilar religious origins had conditioned their preconceptions on these matters. Since a very early age, Duncan's foster parents had initiated him into the mysteries of occultism. Still a child, Duncan had the opportunity to witness at home occultist seances in which the participants tried to hone their senses to be able to receive voices from beyond. As Duncan recalls from those days, "for my parents, the truth of things was esoteric (locked inside) or occult (masked by the apparent), and one needed a 'lost key' in order to piece out the cryptogram of who wrote Shakespeare or who created the universe and what his real message was" (Fictive Certainty 3). As a strong believer in hermetism, Duncan emphasized the unconscious dynamisms operating in the poet's mind during the process of composition, and the poet's intuitive capacities to let himself drift in the right directions. So, rather than actively seeking out that supreme form, the composer was a medium, almost in a state of trance, his sensory faculties and his intuition alert to the wavering manifestations of the new form. "When I speak of form," Duncan states in his essay "The Truth and Life of Myth," "I mean not something the poet gives to things but something he receives from things" (Fictive Certainty 30).

Yet while Duncan spoke of a form infusing a poet who must suspend his rational activity to let himself be guided by his intuition, Levertov was making reference to a form which the poet had to actively "discover and reveal" and labeled organic poetry as "exploratory" (The Poet in the Worm 7).

Put more bluntly, Levertov was attributing a component of volition just where Duncan was denying the role of the intellectual faculties. As a political anarchist, Duncan had always felt a distrust for the impingement of the rationalizing mind upon the process of composition. The poet had to let the poem take hold with its own directives, and it was only in the presentness of the composition that those directives were fully revealed. To further support this argument, in his essay "Towards an Open Universe" Duncan cites Olson's warning to poets to "engage speech where it is least careless and least logical." Similarly, Duncan took Olson's directive "the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE" as an indication that "the mind was not to be diverted by what it wanted to say but to attend to what was happening immediately in the poem" (Fictive Certainty 84). And, continuing with the same trend of thought, Duncan juxtaposed to this Olson's second maxim, "the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE," as a further indication that Olson was ruling out thought--"all the thots men are capable of can be entered on the back of a postage stamp," Olson stated in his essay--to favor process, i.e., how "the PLAY of a mind" (1) interacted with the syllables composing the line.

Duncan considered that all these passages came to reinforce his view of composition as a process in which the poet had to be specially attentive to how the play of the mind dictated a corresponding play of syllables in each line of the poem. But in order to do so, the poet had to suspend the consciousness of what he wants to say (Olson's "thot") to enter the consciousness of what his art is directing him to say.

Borrowing from Olson's analogy with the dance, in "Towards an Open Universe" Duncan further argues that

 the dancer comes into the dance when he loses his consciousness
 of his own initiative, what he is doing, feeling, or thinking,
 and enters the consciousness of the dance's initiative, taking
 feeling and thought there. The self-consciousness is not lost
 in a void but in the transcendent consciousness of the
 dance. (83)

The poet thus acquires a different, yet deeper, mode of awareness, the awareness of the process, "instant by instant." In the midst of this process, the composer arrives to merge with the cosmos in a syncretic unity of all time:

 We are aware only in the split second in which the dance is
 present. This presentation, our immediate consciousness, the
 threshold that is called both here-and-now and eternity, is
 an exposure in which, perilously, identity is shared in
 resonance between the person and the cosmos. (83)

Summing up, both Levertov and Duncan assimilated differently Olson's theory of the dance of the mind. Whereas Levertov refashioned it into her "cadences of perception," Duncan took it to mean that whatever was to be revealed to the poet was to be discovered only in the presentness of composition, and only after he loses consciousness of what he knows, in order to enter the immediate consciousness of the art's own initiative. The latter obviously implied that there were to be no discoveries either anterior to the presenteness of composition or exterior to the consciousness of the art itself. Small wonder, then, that one of Duncan's favorite quotes from Levertov's essay "Some Notes on Organic Form" might be the one in which she argued that the kind of experience the poet was facing was "discoverable only in the work, not before it" (The Poet in the World 9).

Levertov, however, would later make some amendments to Duncan's reading of this sentence. As she makes clear in her memoir essay about her correspondence with Duncan: "I meant 'discoverable' quite precisely--not 'that which comes into being only in the work' but that which, though present in a dim unrecognized or ungrasped way, is only experienced in any degree of fullness in art's concreteness" (New and Selected Essays 213). And she further complains that "Duncan seems on the brink of saying one does not even start off from the known" (New and Selected Essays 214).

Duncan was indeed strongly suspicious of any preconceived (known) ideas, however "dim" and "unrecognized," forming part of the poem, for he strongly suspected these preconceptions as a coercion exercised by what he would later call the "tyranny of the will." Levertov, on the other hand, didn't see that there was any contradiction in "starting off' from some vague knowledge, since the poem would always provide in the end a deeper (and changed) mode of revelation. In contrast with Duncan, Levertov did never reject the intervention of the poet's consciousness or intellect in the process of composition but rather stressed the importance of a perfect equilibrium between senses, emotions, and the intellect. And though she begins her definition of organic poetry citing Gerard Manley Hopkins's "inscape"--"the pattern of essential characteristics both in single objects and (what is more interesting) in objects in a state of relation to each other"--and "instress"--"the experiencing of the perception of inscape--" she expresses her intention to extend the use of those terms to "intellectual and emotional experience as well," and not exclusively to "sensory phenomena" (The Poet in the World 7).

Further still, in describing how organic poetry works, Levertov places meditation, clearly a product of the rationalizing mind, at the origins of composition. According to her, contemplation and meditation are words that "connote a state in which the heat of feeling warms the intellect," and this warming of the intellect is what lies at the origins of the demand of the poem. She even brings attention to the fact that the meaning of both words is strongly connected with poetic inspiration: "to meditate is 'to keep the mind in a state of contemplation'; its synonym is 'to muse,' and to muse comes from a word meaning 'to stand with open mouth'--not so comical if we think of 'inspiration'--to breathe in" (The Poet in the Worm 8). Hence, the inspiration for the poem is associated with the poet's musing on his perceptions.

"Sands of the Well," the title poem of the last volume published in Levertov's lifetime, illustrates Levertov's conception of organic poetry as a process that is set in motion by her musing on perceptions of objects in nature. The whole poem seems to revolve around her vision of the sand grains circling down to the bottom of the well and clouding its water until they return to their pristine transparency. But as the poet "keeps her mind in this state of contemplation," she becomes aware of the mystery incarnated in the waters of the well after they return to their former stillness.

 The golden particles
 descend, descend,
 traverse the water's
 depth and come to rest
 on the level bed
 of the well until,
 the full descent
 accomplished, water's
 absolute transparence
 is complete, unclouded
 by constellations
 of bright sand.
 Is this
 the place where you
 are brought in meditation?
 Transparency
 seen for itself--
 as if its quality
 were not, after all,
 to enable
 perception not of itself?
 With a wand
 of willow I again
 trouble the envisioned pool,
 the cloudy nebulae
 form and disperse,
 the separate
 grains again
 slowly, slowly
 perform their descent,
 and again
 stillness ensues,
 and the mystery
 of that sheer
 clarity, is it water indeed,
 or air, or light?

Since she had been instructed from a very early age on knowing how to look, Levertov's contemplative eyes are apt to recognize that which lies occult behind the apparent, thus opening her mind to the mystery taking place behind common appearance. Having observed with keen eye and meditated--even checked once more--upon the process that makes the mysterious happen, she proceeds to explore and name that mystery in the process of composition.

Thus, though the words of the poem arise out of a perceptive and meditative experience that can be said to be anterior to it, it is in the course of the poem that the poet really discovers the full import of her perception: "the mystery / of that sheer / clarity, is it water indeed, / or air, or light?" With "Sands of the Well" Levertov is applying her ideas about organic poetry, showing that if contemplation is acute and the words are rendered in absolute faithfulness to the poet's unique experience of it, the poem can also be made a participant of the mystery, its "form never more than a revelation of content": "that sheer / clarity."

But, harkening back to my argument about their differences in matters of composition, though they both departed from Olson's new poetics, each of them had adapted this poetics to their personal aesthetic and ethical configurations. Thus, when the war broke out, and required of them an immediate poetic response, they found themselves at cross-purposes over how to realize the truth of the conflict in and through the poem. Duncan began to criticize Levertov harshly for misusing the poem and putting it at the service of her personal convictions against the system. For instance, in his long letter of October-November 1971, Duncan put Levertov to hard task for not actually composing in the organic mode when she wrote her revolutionary poetry:

 But our initial breakthru was not to be concernd with
 form as conservative or revolutionary, but with form
 as the direct vehicle and medium of content. Which
 means and still means for me that we do not say
 something by means of the poem but the poem is itself
 the immediacy of the saying--it has its own meaning.
 (Bertholf and Gelpi 668)

In rough terms, Duncan was lashing out against Levertov for using the poem as a vehicle for her own revolutionary preconceptions, whilst accusing her of a poetic failure to project her idea of rebellion into the composed structure of the poem. In Duncan's view, this was turning her poetry into a mere vehicle for political convictions and agitprop. And one can hardly fail to see their strong contentions on this matter as the outcome of the different paths they had taken in their efforts to assimilate and translate into verse Olson's ideas. For while Duncan assimilated Olson's maxims as fully discarding the intervention of the intellect during the process of composition, Levertov interpreted them in a less restrictive sense.

SOMETHING strikingly similar happened with their divergent views of the meaning and function of the imagination. As was the case with their discrepancies over composition, here the first signs of a future rupture started to become evident some few years before the war erupted in their lives.

In a letter responding to Levertov's essay "A Note on the Work of the Imagination," whose manuscript Levertov had sent him before publishing it, Duncan did not refrain from making some objections against her conceptualization of the imagination, especially in what concerned her distinction between the terms fancy and imagination. In her essay Levertov recounted a dream she had experienced; in this dream the poet enters a small room in a large house and approaches a mirror to check whether her imagination was capable of a veracious picture; surmounting her fear of a "blank, or strange" reflection of her face, she got near and dared to look at herself in the mirror: "Why!--in the dark, somewhat fluffy hair was a network of little dew or mist diamonds, like spider's web on the fall of morning!"; as Levertov explained in her essay, the nature of her dream made her realize what quality she admired in the great writers: the vivid and illuminating details provided by their imaginations. Concomitant with this, Levertov rated the imagination, a source of "exquisitely realistic detail," over fancy, or "the feared Hoffmanesque blank--the possible monster or stranger" (The Poet in the World 204).

In his letter, dated October 1959, Duncan problematized Levertov's categorization, "distrusting its discrimination" and reformulating the whole argument as a distinction between memory and the presented. Duncan rejected Levertov's discriminations using categorical words: "we can't make the choice between monster as fancy and the crown-of-dew as the imagination" (Bertholf and Gelpi 213). In her essay, "Some Duncan Letters--A Memoir and a Critical Tribute," Levertov acknowledges that they had developed by then opposing views about the function of the imagination. As she argues in her essay, "here the disagreement is substantial, for the very point I was trying to make concerned the way in which the active imagination illuminates common experience, and not by mere memory but by supplying new detail we recognize as authentic" (New and Selected Essays 218). In this same essay, Levertov sticks to her discrimination between fancy, understood as "'playful' and sometimes 'trivial' and frequently 'contrived' or 'thought up'" (New and Selected Essays 219), and the imagination, defined as a source of illuminating detail we recognize as authentic about our lives. But the letter of October, 1959 foreshadowed much of what was going to happen between them in just a matter of a few years, when they would start to contend over how to imagine the truth of the war in their poems. Though they made strenuous efforts to put their differences behind them--"I am drawn by the conceptual imagination rather than the perceptual imagination" (Bertholf and Gelpi 215), Duncan conceded then in a forgiving manner--these would nevertheless come to the surface with all the more force during the Vietnam days. Yet Duncan's judgment of their different inclinations respecting the imagination provides the key to understanding why they couldn't compromise on this matter.

Duncan was absolutely right in his contention that Levertov's idea of the imagination veered towards the perceptual rather than towards conceptual abstractions. From her first volumes published in the United States, Levertov had shown herself to possess a keen eye for recreating in her lines the smallest details of common reality. This is a quality which she owed to her Welsh mother, who taught her to contemplate the miracles of nature and to give them a name. Not surprisingly, the connection between perceptions, imaginative infusions, and language constitutes one of the major motifs in Levertov's poetry. "The Well," from The Jacob's Ladder, is an example of a poem in which Levertov manages to fuse many of the elements that in her life have been intimately linked to inspiration and the creative process.

In the poem Levertov presents a Muse wading in the deep of a lake at what she calls "the baroque park" of her vision. The Muse carries a pitcher under her arm and fills it completely by dipping it in the water, which arises from "deep enough" beneath the lake; linked to the Muse, this simple act evokes other mythic motifs related to inspiration, such as a veiled allusion to the spring of Hippocrene, which Levertov herself later referred to in her essay, "Horses with Wings," as "the fountain of poetic inspiration sacred to the Muses" (New and Selected Essays 112).

 The Muse
 in her dark habit,
 trim-waisted,
 wades into deep water.

 The spring where she
 will fill her pitcher to the brim
 wells out
 below the lake's surface, among
 papyrus, where a stream
 enters the lake and is crossed
 by the bridge on which I stand.

 She stoops
 to gently dip and deep enough.

 Her face resembles
 the face of the young actress who played
 Miss Annie Sullivan, she who
 spelled the word "water" into the palm
 of Helen Keller, opening
 the doors of the world.

Levertov's association of the Muse with Annie Sullivan and the "miracle" she performs in the play, The Miracle Worker, spelling "water" on the palm of her blind student, and thus "opening / the doors of the world" for her, also serves to announce the magic powers of this wading Muse.

As the poet approaches the fountain in this "baroque park," the latter transforms itself, in her dream-imagined vision, into Valentines Park, a park located near London, in the Ilford countryside, and a favorite visiting place for her and her dead sister Olga in the remote days of their childhood.

 In the baroque park,
 transformed as I neared the water
 to Valentines, a place of origin,
 I stand on a bridge of one span
 and see this calm act, this gathering up
 of life, of spring water

Valentines Park is the site of the well, a recurrent inspirational motif in Levertov's poetry. As Christopher MacGowan argues in "Valentines Park: 'A Place of Origins,'" the well becomes, in poem after poem, "a rich metaphor embodying multiple levels of time, exploration, self-discovery, and understanding" (5). The poet witnesses the Muse's "calm" filling of her pitcher and recognizes this act as life-giving, a "gathering up / of life." The stream passing below the bridge, on which she stands, to flow into the lake which connects with the river Roding prompts in her a mythical allusion to the god Alpheus:

 and the Muse gliding then
 in her barge without sails, without
 oars or motor, across
 the dark lake, and I know
 no interpretation of these mysteries
 although I know she is the Muse
 and that the humble
 tributary of Roding is
 one with Alpheus, the god who as a river
 flowed through the salt sea to his love's well

 so that my heart leaps
 in wonder.
 Cold, fresh, deep, I feel the word 'water'
 spelled in my left palm.

The mythical story of Alpheus, the god who metamorphosed into a river in his pursuit of his beloved Arethusa, who had been turned into a spring by the goddess Arthemis, marks this well, and by extension the water the Muse takes out from it, as blessed with love. The final stanza, though strangely ignored in criticisms of the poem, contains, I think, the first clues to understand the poet's involvement in the mystery. Sullivan's spelling of "water" on the palm of her blind student is reproduced by the Muse on the poet who feels now how "the word 'water'" is spelled on her hand.

What makes of this poem such an interesting case in Levertov's poetry on inspiration and the imagination is how her mythological references to the Muse are intermingled with the most intimately personal. What seems, at first sight, an apparently fanciful episode (Sullivan's spelling of the word "water") has, however, a strong connection with the personal. In real life, it was Levertov's mother who acted as her own personal Muse, initiating her in the mysteries of Nature and instilling in her a passion for the attentive seeing and naming of natural objects. In "The 90th Year," a poem from Life in the Forest, Levertov overtly honors the influence her mother had on her way of looking and her naming of things in nature:

 (It was she
 who taught me to look;
 to name the flowers when I was still close to the ground,
 my face level with theirs;
 or to watch the sublime metamorphoses
 unfold and unfold
 over the walled back gardens of our street ...

Duncan's and Levertov's different approaches to the imagination were rooted then in their different upbringings; whereas Levertov was always specially receptive to those small perceptive details of the external world that nurtured her imagination, Duncan was more eager for the occult messages that his visionary mind could reveal to him in the interplay between concepts and language. Yet it was the war that revealed the real dimension of these differences, showing deep rifts where they thought that, despite some minor misunderstandings, they had been stepping on a safe, common ground.

As two poets of a similar mystic and Neoromantic makeup, Levertov and Duncan had shaped their conceptions of the imagination after a common mould. This was a quality Levertov instantly perceived in the Duncan of Heavenly City, Earthly City. As Levertov once confessed, what attracted her to Duncan was that "old, incantatory tradition" of New Romanticism to which she found she also belonged and that served her as a "kind of transatlantic stepping stone" (New and Selected Essays 196). It is no wonder that Duncan could see so many correspondences between their first volumes, for they had their literary roots drenched in a common Romantic lineage, a tradition they both reechoed in their first verses. It was because their respective families had instilled in them a strong dose of mystic lore that they instantly recognized a common mystic configuration from the moment they started to read each other's poems.

In allegiance to their common Romantic origins, both Duncan and Levertov premised their poetry upon the supremacy of the imagination. In their poems and essays alike, they both alluded to the imagination as a magnificent power which the poet earns without labor, yet one that he or she must administer with awe.

But though it is true that they both shared a common Romantic conception of the imagination, it is no less true that the Romantic imagination had been filtered by the lenses of Modernism. And each of them had taken a different Modernist cue. As spearheads of the Modernist movement, both Williams and Stevens launched, rather soon in their careers, on an outright redefinition of the Romantic imagination. Yet each poet produced an antithetical epistemology of the new Modernist imagination. Put rather schematically here, (2) while Stevens wielded the imagination as a shield against what he called the "malady of the quotidian," Williams valued it as a force that derived its powers from its contacts with the external world. In his essay titled "Imagination as Value," Stevens advocated a necessary detachment from objective reality in order to preserve intact the virtues of the imaginative mind; as he put it in his essay, "we live in the mind" (140). Williams, in sharp contrast, dismissed Stevens's view of the imagination as a misunderstanding of its nature and function. As he warned in Spring and All, "the imagination is wrongly understood when it is supposed to be a removal from reality" (234).

Thus, whereas Levertov drew upon Williams's recasting of the imagination as a force that serves to clarify our perceptions of reality, Duncan departed from Stevens's recasting of the imagination as an artifice of the mind which requires a certain detachment from reality in order to realize its full potential.

Duncan's "The Fire: Passages 13" (Bending the Bow), a poem published in the midst of the political upheavals caused by the war, exemplifies his Stevensian concept of the imagination. In the poem Duncan praises Piero di Cosimo's mastery of technique in his painting A Forest Fire. In this painting, the Italian Renaissance artist depicts a chaotic scene, a wood in flames from which "our animal spirits flee," panic-stricken. But among the animals, we can distinguish a group of humanized animals: "the man-faced roe and his / gentle mate; the wild boar too / turns a human face." Instead of letting themselves be driven by the surrounding chaos, these man-faced visages show their "philosophical sorrow" for the chaos and turmoil that is assailing them--most surely, a stance Duncan strongly identified with.

Yet, against the backdrop of the flames and the smoke, di Cosimo's gradating brushstrokes enable him to blur this dramatic scene into an atmosphere more dreamy and pastoral. His admirable technique and the power of his integral imagination have worked the miracle on the canvas; thanks to his use of sfumato, which he had inherited from his master Leonardo da Vinci, the painter has managed to reinvent a self-contained atmosphere of his own design and thus counterbalance an episode full of terror and turmoil with an opposite one of stillness and peace. In the poem, Duncan invokes the magic of Pletho, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Italian syncretist and Neoplatonist philosophers, as symbols of the power to bind all ages in one, all conflicts in one, with the help of syncretic lore. Syncretism has the power to revive, through David's harmonious song, the first notes of Orpheus and thus appease Saul's rage under the conviction that all ages are contemporaneous, and that all wars are one war: "Saul in his flaming rage heard, music / Orpheus first playd, / chords and melodies of the spell that binds / the many in conflict in contrasts of one mind."

Excelling in his admirable technique, the painter uses soft transitions to recreate a peaceful atmosphere of "featherd, furrd, leafy / boundaries where even the Furies are birds / and blur in higher harmonies Eumenides." The Furies, goddesses of anger and vengeance, have been magically transformed into Eumenides, literally the kind ones. And, as if mesmerized by the painter's use of technique, the animals enter too "a charmd field / in the light of his vision, a stillness."

Through this allegory, Duncan was inflecting his views about the function the artist must serve in times of chaos. Just as Piero di Cosimo used sfumato to create anew a world inhabited by higher harmonies, so--he seems to be implying--should poets resort to a similar technique in order to "set up in the midst of the truth of What Is, the truth of what we imagine" (Fictive Certainty 112). In Duncan's view, this could only be attained through a recul (read a blurring of the colors) from the onrush of events and emotions the war had multiplied. So, it was the poet's responsibility, if he wanted to realize the truth of what he imagines, to detach himself from the chaos and confusion brought about by the war, and to oppose this chaos with a poetry of stillness. This was another major motive of confrontation with Levertov, for Duncan believed that she was being consumed by a revolutionary fire which was preventing her from imagining the truth of the conflict. As he tells her in his 1971 letter, "the poet's role is not to oppose evil but to imagine it" (Bertholf and Gelpi 669).

Yet Levertov didn't take this as contradictory. Imagining evil meant confronting and resisting it in daily life, moved by a feeling of commiseration for its many victims. In this sense, Levertov's "Snail," from her 1970 volume Relearning the Alphabet, can be read as a poetic response to Duncan's ethical and aesthetic self-positioning in "The Fire." Wearied by the burden that means dragging that snail's "brittle" shell on her back, the poet craves to "crawl / out" of it and thus obtain the worm's "lowly freedom that can go / under earth." Besides his capacity to freely dig and burrow its way through subterranean realms, the worm's "slow arrow pierces / the thick of dark,"--a veiled reference perhaps to Duncan's imaginative recul in Bending the Bow.

But though tempted by the advantages inherent in being a worm, the poet finally chooses to continue being a snail, fully conscious as she is that she has to go on dragging the "Burden, grace" of its shell--a metaphor for how the war had dragged her into a frenzy of activities that took her time away from writing. Yet, as she acknowledges in the poem, "in my shell / my life was," and it is only when she recognizes this that she remembers which quality makes the snail more apt to confront the realities of the external world: "my eyes adept to witness / air and harsh light / and look all ways." Snail eyes can look in more than one direction and so they can encompass within their range of vision man's capacity for evil and for goodness, for destruction and for redemption. Thus, instead of resorting to the technique of sfumato, Levertov uses a polarized contrast between shades and lights, a series of chiaroscuros, to foreground the redemptive light of the perceptual imagination against the backdrop of the shadows of war. To continue the analogy with painting, her model painter in this would have been someone like Caravaggio and not Piero di Cosimo.

Paradoxically enough then, while Duncan embraced a blurring of the visual contours to protect the potential of the imagination from being damaged, Levertov was constantly complaining that the war had blurred her vision and, by extension, damaged her perceptive imagination of self and other. This to such an extent that "the loss of vision and poetic power," as James F. Mersmann concludes in Out of the Vietnam Vortex, turned into "the primary theme" (87) of Levertov's antiwar poetry.

As Levertov bitterly laments in "Advent 1966," from To Stay Alive, the repeated vision of infant flesh set ablaze in Vietnam had finally blurred her "poet's sight." The edge of her perceptions had been blunted by a "cataract filming over / my inner eyes." In "Life at War," another poem from the same volume, Levertov refers to the disastrous effects the war has had on her imagination, an imagination which is now "filmed over with the gray filth of it." Destitute of perceptual imagination, the poet cannot make real to her mind the intensity of other people's suffering, and for this reason she finds it hard to poetically revive (and recognize) other people's lives in all their dimensions. Borrowing from Charles Altieri's choice of a title in his essay on Levertov's political poetry, "Denise Levertov and the Limits of the Aesthetics of Presence," this not only conditions her "aesthetics of presence" but also how she views herself as a poet in the world. For as Altieri rightly argues in this essay, "there can be no self respect without respect for others, no love and reverence for others without love and reverence for oneself; and no recognition of others is possible without the imagination" (143). In "The Cold Spring," a poem from Relearning the Alphabet, the poet suffers the loss of identity just as she finds her capacity for vision drastically maimed: "Reduced to an eye / I forget what / I / was"--the double entendre playing too on her blurred vision, (one) single eye. And in the same poem she expresses her desire for self-recognition and communion through the imagination, "we wanted / more of our life to live in us. / To imagine each other."

As a Neoromantic poet, Levertov envisioned the imagination as a supreme faculty of human perception. For example, in "Prologue" (To Stay Alive), Levertov pictures self-immolators as flaming torches which "Might burn through the veil that blinds / those who do not imagine the burned bodies / of other people's children." And she applies again tones of chiaroscuro to depict them as "Brands that flare to show us / the dark we are in."

A similar technique is used in "Part III," a long poem divided into various sections and belonging to the same book. In section number ix, Levertov recalls a dream Bet, her British friend of her childhood days, had shared with her a few days before. As Bet told her, she dreamt "over and over" that she appeared in the middle of a dark tunnel guarded at each end by "great dogs." The dream was so recurring that she thought that she had to resign herself to go on dreaming the same dream over and over again; but Mrs. Simon, who had been listening, suggested to her: why didn't she imagine that she sat in the "middle of the tunnel" and, with a sort of injunction, she tells her to "Make a place for yourself / in the darkness / and wait there. Be there." And she tells her why this is necessary:

 Your being, a fiery stillness,
 is needed to TRANSFORM
 The dogs.

What Levertov seems to be trying to convey in this poem is that the nightmares of her days, however much recurring and naturalized, shouldn't make her yield to resignation. By using the technique of chiaroscuro once more, Levertov is highlighting the imagination as that supreme force that can serve to undo (TRANSFORM) evil by just being. As Altieri argues:

 Man's capacity for evil, then, is less a positive capacity,
 for all its horrendous activity, than a failure to develop
 man's most human function, the imagination, to its fullness,
 and consequently a failure to develop compassion. (143)

As someone educated in an eclectic Christianity, Levertov believed in the redeemability of human kind through its works. In her antiwar poetry, Levertov fused her mystic Christianity with her conceptualizations of both organic poetry and the imagination to make the work of art, in its materiality, speak transparently of that which deeply stirred the artist, to reach out to others. In one of her last letters to Duncan before they abruptly ended their correspondence, Levertov confesses her preference for "works where need to speak (in whatever medium was theirs) arose from experiences not of a technical nature but of a kind which people unconnected with that medium also shared (potentially anyway)." And she explicitly refers to a new inscape, a "revealed inscape" which results after "the conjoining of some other life experience with the present experience of the wood, the material. Each grasped, revealed, by way of the other" (Bertholf and Gelpi 680).

In conclusion, both Levertov and Duncan had different views about composition and the imagination. And though they both departed from Olson's "Projective Verse," and from a common Romantic idea of the imagination, each of them readjusted these principles to make them fit their different ethical and aesthetic configurations. It is hard to tell what could have happened if they hadn't decided to put such a brusque end to their correspondence. But with the help of hindsight, what seems clear is that thanks in part to the ongoing dialectic in their correspondence the field of Postmodern poetics looks now a vast and boundless meadow.

Notes

(1) In "Projective Verse" Olson compared the interactions between the play of the mind and the line to a choreography performed on a dance floor, in a didactic effort to show that the line is the place that serves to record the dance of the mind among perceptions: "So, is it not the PLAY of a mind we are after, is not that that shows whether a mind is there at all? ... And the threshing floor for the dance? Is it anything but the LINE?" (19).

(2) In "Stevens and Williams: The Epistemology of Modernism" Gelpi provides a much better and detailed account of Stevens' and Williams' opposing conceptualizations of the modernist imagination.

Works Cited

Allen, Donald M., ed. The New American Poetry, 1945-1960. New York: Grove, 1960.

Altieri, Charles. "Denise Levertov and the Limits of the Aesthetics of Presence." Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993. 126-147.

Bertholf, Robert J. and Albert Gelpi, eds. The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.

Block, Ed, ed. Spirit in the Poetry of Denise Levertov. Renascence 50. 1-2 (Special issue: Fall 1997/Winter 1998).

Duncan, Robert. Heavenly City, Earthly City. Berkeley: Gillick P, 1947.

--. Bending the Bow. New York: New Directions, 1968.

--. Fictive Certainties. New York: New Directions, 1985. Gelpi, Albert. Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

--. ed. Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993.

--. "Stevens and Williams: The Epistemology of Modernism." Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 3-23. Levertov, Denise. The Jacob's Ladder. New York: New Directions, 1961.

--. Relearning the Alphabet. New York: New Directions, 1970.

--. To Stay Alive. New York: New Directions, 1971.

--. The Poet in the World. New York: New Directions, 1973.

--. Life in the Forest. New York: New Directions, 1978.

--. New and Selected Essays. New York: New Directions, 1992.

--. Sands of the Well. New York: New Directions, 1996.

Little, Anne Coclough and Susie Paul, eds. Denise Levertov: New Perspectives. West Cornwall: Locust Hill P, 2000.

MacGowan, Christopher. 2000. "Valentines Park: 'A Place of Origins.'" Denise Levertov: New Perspectives. West Cornwall: Locust Hill P, 2000.3-15.

Mersmann, James F. Out of the Vietnam Vortex: A Study of Poets and Poetry against the War. Wichita: U of Kansas P, 1974.

Olson, Charles. Selected Writings. Ed. Robert Creeley. New York: New Directions, 1966.

Rich, Adrienne. "Poetic Dialogue: The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov." Los Angeles Times. April 25, 2004: 10.

Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1951.

Williams, William Carlos. The Collected Poems 1909-1939. Eds. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1986.