SOURCE: "The Poet in the World," in The Poet in the World, New Directions Books, 1973, pp. 107-16.

In the following essay, originally delivered at a symposium in 1967, Levertov asserts that poets must be actively and politically engaged in the events of their time.

The poet is in labor. She has been told that it will not hurt but it has hurt so much that pain and struggle seem, just now, the only reality. But at the very moment when she feels she will die, or that she is already in hell, she hears the doctor saying, "Those are the shoulders you are feeling now"—and she knows the head is out then, and the child is pushing and sliding out of her, insistent, a poem.

The poet is a father. Into the air, into the fictional landscape of the delivery room, wholly man-made, cluttered with shining hard surfaces...