When Denise Levertov was a 12-year-old British girl in 1936, she was already so much a poet that she had the chutzpah to send some of her poems to the august T.S. Eliot. Her sensitive and intuitive biographer, Dana Greene, has seen a copy of his response and thinks that Levertov overstated it. But it was encouraging enough for the neophyte, and there can be no overstating its significance for her.
As Ms. Greene writes, "desire and embryonic talent had already coalesced in a 'secret destiny.'
In any case, Ms. Greene says at her book's beginning, "Ruskin wrote, 'To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.'
