Levertov's Essays Continued

So, I picked up Levertov's collected essays again and continued reading. Odd what solicits a longer response from me, given that since my last entry I've read most of Dante's Inferno, most of Frye's study on Blake "Fearful Symmetry," (more on Blake later) Harold Bloom's collection "Romanticism and Consciousness," but what seems to get me to actually write an entry is a smallish low print run book of essays by Denise Levertov. There's something about a well-written essay that opens up an ordered internal space. For me, this mostly occurs when I read essays written by poets (Wiman's "Ambition and Survival," Walcott's "What the Thunder Says," Heaney's "Finder's Keepers" to name a few I've come across recently...or to be more honest, those which Wiman recommends in one of his essays). I think this has something to do with a poet's attention to detail, the care with which words are chosen, the facility a good poet has with ideas and their interrelationship, a knack for the timely image, and a motivation to be precise. I'm thinking of some of the moral implications of art that Levertov argues for. In her work, it seems, she was frequently responding to critics saying she ought to be an observer, not an activist, artistic, but not didactic. For Levertov, however, deep attention to art cultivates a moral sensitivity, cultivates a kind of sacred awareness, or the longing for it, and the lack of it. She quotes a speaker at a Danforth Conference (in 1966!) named Tom Bradley, who says

"Literature is dynamite because it asks - proposes - moral questions and seeks to define the nature and worth of man's life...The vision of man we get from art conditions our vision of society and therefore our political behavior...Art and social life are in a dialectic relationship to each other that is synthesized by political action."

Levertov herself continues: "The literary critic or the teacher of literature is merely scratching the surface if he does not live out in his own life some experience of the multitudinous interactions in time, space, memory, dream, and instinct that at every word tremble into synthesis in the work of a poet, or if he keeps his readings separate in a box labeled 'aesthetic experiences.' The interaction of life on art and of art on life is continuous. Poetry is necessary to a whole man, and that poetry be not divided from the rest of life is necessary to it. Both life and poetry fade, wilt, shrink, when they are divorced."

Now, on the one hand I feel like applauding. On the other hand, I feel like hiding behind a large patch of shrubbery. I frequently harangue my wife for reading many light novels quickly, and for rarely delving into the ethical questions they open up, of mining for truth, or whatever. She wants pace and plot more than thematic complexity, allusive texture, and conceptual depth. And I sit back and fold my arms thinking, "but it's supposed to mean something, dammit." Meanwhile I can tease out ethical implications of McCarthy's The Road or Wiesel's Night and assign projects to bring it home for the students, expanding their awareness and all that, but when it comes to lifting a finger to bring about real change in the world? Um, can't we just read another book?