[3] She was heavily influenced by the Black Mountain poets and by the political context of the Vietnam War, which she explored in her poetry book The Freeing of the Dust.

[4] Her mother, Beatrice Adelaide (née Spooner-Jones) Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales.

[4][5] Her father, Paul Levertoff, had been a teacher at Leipzig University and as a Russian Hasidic Jew was held under house arrest during the First World War as an "enemy alien" by virtue of his ethnicity.

In the mistaken belief that he would want to preach in a Jewish neighbourhood, he was housed in Ilford, within reach of a parish in Shoreditch, in East London.

[4] His daughter wrote: "My father's Hasidic ancestry, his being steeped in Jewish and Christian scholarship and mysticism, his fervour and eloquence as a preacher, were factors built into my cells.

"[6] Levertov, who was educated at home, showed an enthusiasm for writing from an early age and studied ballet, art, piano and French as well as standard subjects.

She wrote about the strangeness she felt growing up part Jewish, German, Welsh and English, but not fully belonging to any of these identities.

"[4] She noted: "Humanitarian politics came early into my life: seeing my father on a soapbox protesting Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia; my father and sister both on soap-boxes protesting Britain's lack of support for Spain; my mother canvasing long before those events for the League of Nations Union; and all three of them working on behalf of the German and Austrian refugees from 1933 onwards… I used to sell the Daily Worker house-to-house in the working class streets of Ilford Lane".

In 1947, she met and married American writer Mitchell Goodman and moved with him to the United States the following year.

As poetry editor for The Nation, she was able to support and publish the work of feminist and other leftist activist poets.

The Vietnam War was an especially important focus of her poetry, which often tried to weave together the personal and political, as in her poem "The Sorrow Dance", which speaks of her sister's death.

[8] Levertov was a founding member of the anti-war collective RESIST along with Noam Chomsky, Mitchell Goodman, William Sloane Coffin, and Dwight Macdonald.

In 1990, she joined the Catholic Church at St. Edward’s Parish, Seattle; she became involved in protests of the US attack on Iraq.

The first full biography appeared in October 2012 by Dana Greene: Denise Levertov: A Poet's Life (Chicago: University of Illinois, 2012).

Donna Krolik Hollenberg's more substantial biography, A Poet's Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov, was published by the University of California Press in April 2013.

She felt it was part of a poet's calling to point out the injustice of the Vietnam War, and she also actively participated in rallies, reading poetry at some.

Complementary themes in the book involve the tension of the individual vs. the group (or government) and the development of personal voice in mass culture.

Throughout these poems, she addresses violence and savagery, yet tries to bring grace into the equation, mixing the beauty of language and the ugliness of the horrors of war.

From a very young age Levertov was influenced by her religion, and when she began writing it was a major theme in her poetry.

[7] When Levertov moved to the United States, she fell under the influence of the Black Mountain Poets, especially the mysticism of Charles Olson.

In 1997, she brought together 38 poems from seven of her earlier volumes in The Stream & the Sapphire, a collection intended, as Levertov explains in the foreword to the collection, to "trace my slow movement from agnosticism to Christian faith, a movement incorporating much doubt and questioning as well as affirmation."

In "Work that Enfaiths" Levertov begins to confront this "ample doubt" and her lack of "burning surety" in her faith.

A Door in the Hive and Evening Train are full of poems using images of cliffs, edges, and borders to push for change in life.

In "The Tide", the final section of Evening Train, Levertov writes about accepting faith and realizing that not knowing answers is tolerable.

She wrote a great deal of metaphysical poetry to express her religious views, and began to use Christianity to link culture and community together.