Pencil Notes in the Margin: The Vision of Denise Levertov

We are living in a time of dread and of awe, of wan hope and of wild hope; a time when joy has to the full its poignance of a mortal flower, and deep content is rare as some fabled Himalayan herb. Ordinary speech no longer suffices. (Denise Levertov, 'Great Posessions', in New and Selected Essays (New Directions, 1992), 120.)

The grandeur of real art...is to rediscover, to grasp again, and lay before us that reality from which we become more and more separated as the formal knowledge which we substitute for it grows in thickness and imperviousness - that reality which there is grave danger we might die without having known and yet which is simply our life. (Marcel Proust, Time Retrieved, quoted in Levertov)

Twenty and more years ago, when this essay was first written Levertov had already diagnosed the malaise that was settling over a world  increasingly and anxiously uncertain about the future it was busy creating. This essay, 'Great Possesions', she explores the above quotation from Proust, the 'great Possessions which are our real life'.  And she argues that poetry may be the one source  of 'song that suffices to our need.' I have long read and listened to Levertov's voice, and tried to see with her vision; the political and ethical edges, the importance of poems 'to inform us of the essential', her commitment to an aesthetic of poetry that pays attention to human significance as revealed in the ordinary everydayness of experience, and does so by 'naming and praising what is'.