The poetry of Levertov was unique in the sense that it was written by a person who happened to cross the Atlantic at the age of twenty five and who continued to stay in the US and publish more than thirty volumes of poetry. As a poet whose writings contain elements of both the dominant masculine and feminine traditions, Levertov’s position was transitional and significant. Because of her mixed percentage, she could easily acclimatize with the American background. It is in the poetry collections The Jacob’s Ladder (1961), O Taste and See (1964) and The Sorrow Dance (1967) that one finds her interest moving from the purely feminine world to the world of the meditative, the spiritual and the mystical. It is difficult to categorise her poems because by the late 1960s, when the United States got involved in a war with Vietnam, her sense of social consciousness expressed itself through political poetry of outrage and lamentation. Her collections of the 1980s express her conviction that the exercise of imagination moves one towards faith. She has observed that “the imagination is the perceptive organ through which it is possible .… to experience God.”
She was fully at ease when she wrote as a “woman” about marriage, love, motherhood, the mother-daughter bond, the conflict between the domestic self and the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. This was supplemented by her poems of social protest, of nature, of meditation and vision and her poetry of belief and faith. Levertov, like Tagore, acts as the receptacle of spiritual grace and having imbibed it passes it to humanity especially through the poems in her final collection This Great Unknowing: Last Poems. There are poems of Nature, of living in the numinous presence, of faith, of doubt and of affirmation in this collection.
