Denise Levertov, Poet and Political Activist, Dies at 74

Denise Levertov, a poet of intense emotion and fervid political conviction, died on Saturday at the Swedish Hospital in Seattle, where she lived. She was 74.

The cause was complications from lymphoma, said Griselda Ohannessian of New Directions, Ms. Levertov's publisher.

As a poet and political activist, Ms. Levertov was ''a touchstone, a maintainer for our generation,'' the poet Robert Creeley, one of her first publishers in the United States, said yesterday. ''She was a constantly defining presence in the world we shared, a remarkable and transforming poet for all of us. She always had a vivid emotional response and also a completely dedicated sense of political and social need.''

The poet Kenneth Rexroth once wrote that Ms. Levertov was ''the most subtly skillful poet of her generation, the most profound, the most modest, the most moving.''

In the tradition established by William Carlos Williams, she wrote with a concrete immediacy of language. She spoke directly through her poetry, favoring commonplace objects and images over large philosophical concepts.

The author of more than 30 books of poetry, essays and translations, she wrote with great particularity and sensitivity about aspects of love, spiritual as well as erotic. More and more, her work conveyed her political awareness and social consciousness. She was, as in the title of her first book of essays, ''The Poet in the World.'' At the same time, in her art she would contemplate her own life, writing confessional poems about her marital and familial problems. For her, content and form were ''in a dynamic state of interaction.''

In ''The Ache of Marriage,'' she wrote:

The ache of marriage:

thigh and tongue, beloved,

are heavy with it,

it throbs in the teeth

We look for communion

and are turned away, beloved,

each and each

It is leviathan and we

in its belly

looking for joy, some joy

not to be known outside it

two by two in the ark of

the ache of it.

And in ''Of Being,'' she wrote:

I know this happiness

is provisional:

the looming presences --

great suffering, great fear --

withdraw only

into peripheral vision:

but ineluctable this shimmering

of wind in the blue leaves:

this flood of stillness

widening the lake of sky:

this need to dance,

this need to kneel:

this mystery:

A defining moment of her life was the Vietnam War. She helped found a group called the Writers' and Artists' Protest Against the War in Vietnam, she was actively involved in the anti-nuclear movement, and in 1967 she edited a volume of poetry for the War Resisters League. In the same year, she published ''The Sorrow Dance,'' a book of poems whose sorrow included the war and also the death of the poet's sister.

Ms. Levertov was born in Ilford, England. Her father was Paul Philip Levertoff, a Russian Jew who converted to Christianity and became an Anglican priest. Her mother was from Wales. Her father's conversations about the family background in Hasidism and her mother's knowledge of Welsh and English folklore proved influential. Educated by her parents, she was introduced to poetry by her older sister, Olga, and was writing from an early age.

During World War II, she worked as a nurse in London and also began publishing her poetry. In 1940 her first poem appeared in Poetry Quarterly, and, said Mr. Rexroth, he and other poets were soon ''in excited correspondence about her'' as ''the baby of the new Romanticism.'' Her first volume of verse, ''The Double Image,'' was published in 1946.

After the war she married Mitchell Goodman, an American writer, and for several years they lived in France near Mr. Creeley, who was a friend of Mr. Goodman. In 1948 the couple moved to the United States, where Ms. Levertov studied and was influenced by such modernist poets as Williams, Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound, and also continued her artistic relationship with Mr. Creeley, Robert Duncan and other Black Mountain poets.

Both she and her husband frequently spoke out on political issues, particularly regarding the Vietnam War. Mr. Goodman was convicted along with Dr. Benjamin Spock for counseling resistance of the draft. Ms. Levertov and Mr. Goodman were divorced in 1975. Mr. Goodman died last February. They had one son, Nikolai, who lives in Seattle.

When Ms. Levertov's 11th collection of verse, ''The Freeing of the Dust,'' was published in 1975, the poet David Ignatow wrote in The New York Times Book Review that ''by nearly unanimous agreement Levertov was well on her way to becoming one of our leading poets'' with ''her forceful and compassionate presentations of urban lives'' and ''the beauty and sensuousness of her nature poems.'' By shifting to ''passionate Vietnam poems,'' she had lost some of her following but gained a new vitality.

Ms. Levertov wrote through six decades. In the 1990's, she published ''New and Selected Essays''; four poetry volumes, ''Evening Train,'' ''Sands of the Well,'' ''The Life Around Us: Selected Poems on Nature'' and ''The Stream and The Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes,'' and the prose memoir ''Tesserae: Memories and Suppositions.''

She taught at colleges and universities, and served as poetry editor of The Nation and Mother Jones. Among her honors were the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award in poetry and the $50,000 Lannan Prize. In 1996, she won the Governor's Award from the Washington State Commission for the Humanities.

She felt compelled to clarify and justify the uses of poetry in a world of political crisis. In ''New and Selected Essays'' she wrote, ''One is in despair over the current manifestation of malevolent imbecility and the seemingly invincible power of rapacity, yet finds oneself writing a poem about the trout lilies in the spring woods. And one has promised to speak at a meeting or help picket a building. If one is conscientious, the only solution is to attempt to weigh conflicting claims at each crucial moment, and in general to try to juggle well and keep all the oranges dancing in the air at once.''

Ms. Levertov was a masterly juggler of words, images and feelings, as well as a defender of artistic and political liberty.

In ''Overheard Over S.E. Asia,'' she wrote:

I am the snow that burns.

I fall

wherever men send me to fall --

but I prefer flesh, so smooth, so dense:

I decorate it in black, and seek the bone.