Denise Levertov was fitted by birth and political destiny to voice the terrors and pleasures of the twentieth century. Granddaughter on her father's side of a Russian Hasidic Jew and on her mother's of a Welsh mystic, she has published poetry since the 1940s that speaks of the great contemporary themes: Eros, solitude, community, war…. How consistently she has constructed her poems of hard, solid and mysterious qualities can be seen in [Collected Earlier Poems 1940–1960]. (pp. 109-10)

Perhaps because she was educated by private tutors in her English childhood, Levertov seems never to have had to shake loose from an academic style of extreme ellipsis and literary allusion, the self-conscious obscurity that the Provençal poets called "closed" (trobar clus). Other poets—Adrienne Rich, for example—move away from an early brilliant but rigid and pedantic voice to direct and personal speech. A reading of Levertov's early work...