Denise Levertov's "Histrionics"

This article argues that Denise Levertov's antiwar poetry challenges contemporary assumptions about the limits of bearing witness to war. Contrary to George Oppen's intimation that she should limit her writing to "authentic" accounts of her own domestic experience, Levertov wrote about her uneven relationship with the "here" of the Cold War homefront and the "there" of the Vietnam War's violence. In grappling with these two seemingly disparate domains, she exposes the Cold War security state's reliance on gendered household motifs to justify state-sponsored violence across geographic and temporal divides. Levertov treats wartime witnessing as an imaginative and critical encounter with racial and gendered violence-one that relies less on narrating discrete and directly observed events and more on challenging the permissibility of perpetual war itself.