Be(com)ing a Woman: Subjectivity and Poetic Vision in Denise Levertov

Abstract

This essay examines Denise Levertov’s approach to the female subject in the way it is problematized both in her poems and essays. In so far as her commitment to a poetry deriving from experience characterizes her approximation to language and her relationship with the outside world, some of her poems clearly hint at a self-consciousness attained through her literary, political and personal vision. In the wake of the theoretical elaborations that feminist theory has engaged throughout the last two decades, this paper intends to show to what extent Levertov’s poetry articulates textually the pivotal notions that feminists have addressed critically in connection with the self.