드니스 레버토프의 생태시 읽기

Abstract

Denise Levertov is well known as a political poet or an important activist-writer who protests wars and nuclear arms. She, therefore, has written many poems and essays protesting government policy on the nuclear arms, the Vietnam war, women’s rights and also environmental issues, which she said herself are based on her social conscience and conviction. She selected 60 poems on ecological themes from her books of poems into The Life Around Us. This book, which mainly reflects her environmental issues and ecological perspectives, can be divided into four parts in terms of thematic order: travel poems, creature poems, protest poems, and the Rainier mountain poems. As the thematic grouping indicates, Levertov shares with our contemporary ecological poets some ecological principles that in nature each object exists in its own right and with its inherent value, but the existence is fulfilled in the interdependent relation with other objects. And her political issues and environmental concerns are combined to produce protest poems on the environmental crisis. Many poems of The Life Around Us act upon the process of observation, meditation, reflection of nature and the process, which is initiated from and in a distance or what Levertov calls “a middle distance,” is internalized into the poet’s mind. The distance enables the poet to discern repetitions of mountain’s presence and absence. The presence and absence, Levertov believes, is various but genuine figure(s) of the mountain. In this figure made possible by the repetitions of presence and absence, Levertov finds an infinite source to which she can return for her unifying vision, pure passion, and creativity.