Zalman, the founder of the mystical Chabad sect
of Hasidic Judaism, and on her mother’s from
Angell Jones, a leading figure in the development
of modern Welsh literature. Her father, Paul
Levertoff, converted to Christianity and took a
university degree in Germany before immigrat-
ing to England, where he became a priest in the
Church of England and a country parson. Her
mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones, was a writer
and artist herself and homeschooled Levertov.
Levertov would attribute much of her success as
an author to her immediate family and her
ancestry; she made the precocious announce-
ment at age five that she intended to become a
writer, and at age twelve she sent some poems to
the Nobel Prize-winning Anglo-American Poet
T. S. Eliot, receiving back from him a letter of
encouragement. She published her first poem at
age seventeen.
During World War II, Levertov worked as a
nurse, but she also completed a book of poetry,
The Double Image, which was published in 1946
to good reviews. The following year she married
the American writer Mitchell Goodman and
accompanied him back to the United States,
where she would live the rest of her life. Once
in the United States, she began to read American
literature seriously, including classical writers
such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo
Emerson but especially more recent poets such as
Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Lever-
tov held a series of teaching positions at various
universities, most notably Stanford (1982–1993).
She also became the poetry editor at such prom-
inent magazines as theNationandMother Jones.
In the 1950s she was for a time associated with the
experimental Black Mountain poets. In 1956 she
publishedHere and Now, gaining acknowledg-
ment as an important American poet.
Throughout the 1960s Levertov became
politically radicalized and turned her poetry to
protest against the Vietnam War. Her husband
became an important organizer of the antiwar
movement. But in the 1970s she divorced Good-
man and her work and life turned increasingly to
religious concerns. Having been a secular athe-
ist, she converted to Christianity and, in 1984,
to Catholicism. ‘‘A Tree Telling of Orpheus’’
bridges her earlier poetry to the later religious
strand of her work. It was published in 1968 as a
chapbook (a private edition of three hundred
copies) and was included two years later in her
collectionRelearning the Alphabet(1970).
Levertov published over twenty books of
poetry, including the posthumousThis Great
Unknowing: Last Poems(1999), and is generally
recognized as one of the most important Amer-
ican poets of the latter half of the twentieth
century. Nevertheless, her work received little
recognition in terms of literary prizes; she won
the relatively minor Lenore Marshall Poetry
Prize in 1976 forThe Freeing of the Dust. She
died of cancer on December 20, 1997, at her
home in Seattle, Washington.POEM SUMMARY‘‘A Tree Telling of Orpheus’’ consists of 161 lines
and is divided by Levertov into ten separate
sections, although it does not have a standard
stanzaic structure. Told from the tree’s perspec-
tive in its own voice, the poem describes in detail
one of the famous miracles of Orpheus fromDenise Levertov(AP Images)
A Tree Telling of Orpheus