Penguin Modern Poets 9: Denise Levertov, Kenneth Rexroth, William Carlos Williams

Born in Essex, England, Denise Levertov became a U.S. citizen after her marriage to Mitchell Goodman, the writer who was indicted, with Benjamin Spock and the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, for his antiwar activities. She came to New York to live in 1948. Levertov acknowledges that her writing was influenced by William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, show more and Robert Duncan. After her first book, The Double Image (1946), was published in England in 1946, she did not produce another volume until 1957, when City Lights brought out Here and Now. In 1961 she was poetry editor for the Nation, and in 1965 she received the grant in literature from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Her essays collected in The Poet in the World (1973) and Light Up the Cave are written with a penetrating intelligence. Winner of numerous awards and prizes, she is a poet of reverence and fierce moral drive. Denise Levertov died December 20, 1997. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Kenneth Rexroth was born in South Bend, Indiana, and worked at a wide variety of jobs, being largely self-educated. In the late 1950s, he won a number of awards, including an Amy Lowell Travelling Fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Award, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Literature Award. He translated widely, mainly from the Japanese, show more and wrote a lively account of his life, An Autobiographical Novel. His work influenced many younger poets, such as Snyder, and continued in part the traditions of imagism and objectivism. A critic as well as a poet, his collections of essays include American Poetry in the Twentieth Century (1971) and Communalism: From Its Origins to the Twentieth Century (1975). (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Poet, artist, and practicing physician of Rutherford, New Jersey, William Carlos Williams wrote poetry that was experimental in form, ranging from imagism to objectivism, with great originality of idiom and human vitality. Credited with changing and directing American poetry toward a new metric and language, he also wrote a large number of short show more stories and novels. Paterson (1946--58), about the New Jersey city of that name, was his epic and places him with Ezra Pound of the Cantos as one of the great shapers of the long poem in this century. National recognition did not come early, but eventually Williams received many honors, including a vice-presidency of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1952); the Bollingen Prize (1953); the $5,000 fellowship of the Academy of American Poets; the Loines Award for poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1948); and the Brandeis Award (1957). Book II of Paterson received the first National Book Award for poetry in 1949. Williams was named consultant in poetry in English to the Library of Congress for 1952--53. Williams's continuously inventive style anchored not only objectivism, the school to which he most properly belongs, but also a long line of subsequent poets as various as Robert Lowell, Frank O'Hara, and Allen Ginsberg. With Stevens, he forms one of the most important sources of a specifically American tradition of modernism. In addition to his earlier honors, Williams received two important awards posthumously, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1963) and the Gold Medal for Poetry from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1963). (Bowker Author Biography) show less