Double Image, The.
Levertov, Denise. The Double Image. London: The Cresset Press, 1956.
Slim 8vo.; pale yellow cloth, stamped in gilt; off-white dust-jacket; fine.
First edition of Levertov’s first book of poetry; no comparable American edition was published. Praised for her mastery of free form and lyrical verse, Levertov (who inexplicably changed the spelling of her name from “Levertoff” after the publication of her first book) has earned a reputation as a quintessential contemporary poet.
Born in Essex, England in 1923, Levertov was raised in a Judeo-Christian environment: her father, a descendant of the founder of Habad Hasidism, was a Russian Jew, who immigrated to England and became an Anglican minister. Her Welsh mother was also a descendant of a religious figure, the preacher-tailor Angel Jones of Mold. Unquestionably Levertov’s mythic verse was influenced by her parent’s rich religious heritage. Biographer Doris Earnshaw argues that “as a granddaughter of a Russian Hasidic Jew and on her mother’s side of a Welsh mystic, Levertov was fitted by birth and political destiny to voice the terrors and pleasures of the 20th-century.”
Levertov did not receive a formal education. In fact, she attended neither grammar school nor university, however her home schooling, administered by her mother, was thoroughly literary. She read the Victorians extensively, especially Tennyson, studied ballet, and was exposed at an early age to artists and refugees that her father befriended, all of which crafted her aesthetics. Levertov experienced success at an early age: by nineteen her work regularly appeared in English literary journals, such as Poetry Quarterly, Outposts, and Voices.
Levertov was mentored by William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson; through their tutelage, and their work, she adopted a proclivity toward “organic” poetry: the inner harmony of form and content that is ductile enough to embrace polemical responses to political and social issues. She also embraced a style that focused on language and on a congruous, cohesive whole, rejecting fragmentation. In an early interview, she mused:
Poetry is a method of appreciation, i.e., of recognizing what we perceive, and is based on an intuition of order, a form beyond forms, in which forms partake, and of which man’s creative works are analogies, resemblances and natural allegories.
Like Williams, Levertov realized early on that form and language allegorize pastoral imagery, a concept that directed her poetry toward myth. Her language, which she has regarded as the most important element of verse, has lent a voice to the “potential myth of the natural, and of the natural landscape by asserting the strangeness, the ‘otherness,’ and the familiar.”
Her first book, The Double Image (1946), written during her civilian nurse duty at St. Luke’s Hospital in London during WWII, epitomizes her poetical principles. Written in free verse, which, in fact, closely resembles blank verse, The Double Image was largely unknown in the American literary circle until 1949, when Kenneth Rexroth included some of her poems in the American edition of New British Poetry. By then she had married writer and American soldier, Mitchell Goodman and had moved to New York City. After Rexroth’s publication, her work began circulating in American literary journals; she was also offered a position at Black Mountain College. By the mid-fifties, Levertov had established herself as a serious literary figure in both American and England.
Her contribution to poetry has spanned almost six decades and has been the topic of serious critical scholarship. Her cannon consists of over 25 published works and numerous published essays and interviews.
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