(1923 – 1997) Anglo-Californian poet and activist, raised in Essex, Levertov’s early verse is “free” and relatively abstract; later poems are more concrete, yet continue to abjure regularities of line, stanza and margin. American influences include Black Mountain poets and Pound, though Levertov’s speakers do not ventriloquize. Her feminist, antiwar teachings (as with Rukeyser’s) come from lived experience (Hanoi, Berkeley’s People’s Park); her deepimage fables, elegies, travel transcripts and activist tracts pioneer an American poem authentically rooted in a specific self. That Levertov’s consistent moral rigor coincides with formal laxity tests the position that right convictions lead to right poems.