Levi was brought up in the Catholic faith of his Spanish mother (to which his father, a Jew from Istanbul, had converted), and was a member of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) until resigning the Catholic priesthood in 1977 in favour of marriage. He spent a brief period as archaeology correspondent of "The Times", and was elected to a five-year term as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in 1984. He studied classics (Greek and Latin), and as well as poetry wrote on ancient Greek mythology and literature, travel, and other literary biography.
