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    A Study Guide for Denise Levertov's "Illustrious Ancestors"
    A Study Guide for Denise Levertov's "Illustrious Ancestors"
    A Study Guide for Denise Levertov's "Illustrious Ancestors"
    Ebook30 pages20 minutes

    A Study Guide for Denise Levertov's "Illustrious Ancestors"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Denise Levertov's "Illustrious Ancestors", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Studentsfor all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMar 22, 2018
    ISBN9781535845847
    A Study Guide for Denise Levertov's "Illustrious Ancestors"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Denise Levertov's "Illustrious Ancestors" - Gale

      18

      Illustrious Ancestors

      Denise Levertov

      1958

      Introduction

      Illustrious Ancestors is a poem by prominent twentieth-century American poet Denise Levertov. It was published in her collection Overture to the Islands in 1958. The poem is about the writing of poetry and the conditions under which such creativity can take place. In the poem Levertov refers to two of her ancestors, a famous Hasidic rabbi and a Welsh tailor in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and draws from their lives inspiration about the kind of poem she would like to write and how it might be done. The poem is available in Levertov's Selected Poems (2003) and The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov (2013).

      Author Biography

      Levertov was born in Ilford, Essex, England, on October 23, 1923. Her father, Paul Phillip Levertoff, was Russian and Jewish by birth, but he converted to Christianity and became an Anglican priest. Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones, was Welsh. Growing up, Levertov and her sister, Olga, were educated at home by their mother. Both parents read aloud to their children, and Levertov read much poetry for herself. Her first poem was published in 1940, in Poetry Quarterly. From 1943 to 1945, during World War II, Levertov was a civilian nurse in a London hospital. A year later, in 1946, her first book of poetry, The Double Image, was published.

      In 1947, Levertov married an American, Mitchell Goodman, and the following year she moved with her husband to New York. Their son, Nikolai, was born in 1949. (The couple divorced in 1974.) In the United States, Levertov became friends with the poet William Carlos Williams, who became her mentor. She became a US citizen in 1956. During the 1950s she

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