Denise Levertov’s poetry is extraordinarily different from C.H. Sisson’s in tone, style, and subject matter. Sisson’s poetry is introspective to the extreme, and while Levertov’s poems tended to have an introspective side, they still had an outward focus. Sisson gives the sense that the real world is a construct and useful only as it pertains to abstract concepts, while Levertov seems to imply that the real world is, in fact, real, and it is meaningful in its own right. Sisson’s work almost has an ethereal quality, while Levertov’s is more earthy. It isn’t as though Levertov never uses metaphors or anything, but I feel like her metaphors are more palpable than Sisson’s. Sisson takes things that are already distant and abstract and pushes them farther away, while Levertov takes abstract concepts and nails them to the ground with reality.
Levertov definitely has a more modern style than Sisson, and a more liberal use of spacing for effect. Sisson’s poetry, though floating in space in subject matter, is tightly constrained by form. Levertov’s, though more approachable in content, is all over the place form-wise. It makes the poetry more difficult to read, even though it is a bit easier to understand. I think, in general, Levertov is a bit more difficult than Sisson. I find poetry that is “surprising” a tad difficult to comprehend, even if the subject matter is tame. ![]()
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November 2013
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