SOURCE: "Denise Levertov: The Poetry of the Immediate," in Poets in Progress, edited by Edward Hungerford, Northwestern University Press, 1967, pp. 205-26.

Mills is an American educator and critic whose books include Theodore Roethke (1963) and Richard Eberhart (1966). In this essay, originally published in Mills's Contemporary American Poetry in 1965, he analyzes Levertov's poetry as it relates to that of William Carlos Williams and discusses her use of "personal observation and knowledge."

American poetry at the present time sustains two extremes, with a wide range of practice in between in which the best—as well as the most truly advanced—writing is usually done. One extreme is represented by the academic poets. The term does not necessarily apply to all poets who happen to teach in universities for their living, but denotes those writers whose materials are often selected from the history of literature and culture, and whose methods are dictated...