Content area
Full Text
Now I fear the artillery of spring.
A sunlit page protected by snowfalls,
the undiggable earth the monotonous colours,
is kingdom of midwinter and love.
from "Village Snow" (Private Ground 19)1
Over the course of nearly fifty years, Peter Levi (1931-2000) produced a remarkable corpus of poetry. Blending playful modernistic techniques with an impulse for the structure and order of traditional poetic forms, Levi faced a world of barrenness and angst with a believer's devotion to religious faith. The grandson of Sephardic Jews who had emigrated from Constantinople to London, Levi was reared according to his mother's devout Roman Catholicism, a faith that he himself would embrace and follow all his life. Educated at Christian Brothers and Jesuit schools and at Campion Hall, Oxford, Levi spent more than twenty years in the Jesuit priesthood before renouncing his orders in 1974 to marry Deirdre Connolly, widow of critic Cyril Connolly. Throughout both the ecclesial and lay phases of his life, he wrote steadily and copiously, producing ten individual volumes of lyric poetry as well as a significant number of long moral poems.2 In addition to his poetic output, Levi was a prolific literary scholar and translator, an Oxford don, and a classical antiquarian and amateur archaeologist.3 He achieved a measure of celebrity in the 1960s and 70s, using both radio and film to revive the Augustan didactic poem and speak to the nation on moral themes.4 In 1984 he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a five-year chair in which he was succeeded by Seamus Heaney.5 In his final years, blindness brought on by diabetes did not diminish his enthusiasm for his work or alter his poetic vision. Despite his tremendous and varied output, however, Levi has not yet received any significant attention from literary scholars. It is therefore fitting that he once claimed, "I have little respect for most of what is normally called literary criticism, much more for history and the knowledge of languages and peoples" ("Introduction," The Art of Poetry A). Reviewers and fellow poets, however, have justly recognized his regard for human beings and their languages and have hailed his poetry for its intellectual maturity, expressionistic beauty, and profound optimism.6
Even more than his humanism, what created and sustained the recondite...