This collection of essays, written for this volume and often using unpublished and archival materials, converges around the usually close and intense relationship between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, two of the most important and remarkable American poets in the second half of the twentieth century. Their association, played out in their poems and in an extraordinary exchange of letters, was based on a sense of the visionary imagination informing the direction and shape of the poet. However, they had a falling out during the Vietnam crisis over the relationship between poetry and politics, between the private and public responsibilities of the poet.
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Über den Autor Albert (Hrsg.) Gelpi
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Albert Gelpi is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature, emeritus at Stanford University. He is author of Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet (1965) and The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet (1975) and editor of The Poet in America: 1650 to the Present, Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism, Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism, The Blood of the Poet: Selected Poems of William Everson, and Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose. He was founding editor of Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, and has served as Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, Chairman of the American Studies Program, and Chairman of the English Department. Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis was published in 1998. With Robert Bertholf he edited The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov (2004) and the collection of essays, Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov: The Poetry of Politics, the Politics of Poetry (2006). Bernard O'Donoghue is an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, where he taught Medieval English and Modern Irish Poetry. He has published six collections of poetry, including Gunpowder, winner of the 1995 Whitbread Prize for Poetry, and Farmers Cross (2011) which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot prize. His Selected Poems was published by Faber in 2008. He has published a verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Penguin Classics 2006), and his most recent volume The Seasons of Cullen Church was published by Faber in 2016.
