Denise Levertov, one of the 20th-century’s foremost American poets, was born in Ilford, Essex, England, in 1923. She was privately educated and served as a nurse in London during World War II. She emigrated to America in 1948 after she married Mitchell Goodman. They had one son, Nikolai Goodman, who is an artist and writer.

Levertov lived in Somerville, MA, for a number of years while teaching at Brandeis, MIT, and Tufts. She moved to Seattle in 1989 and settled close to Lake Washington in the shadow of Mt. Rainier. She taught part-time at the University of Washington and continued as a full professor at Stanford University for the first quarter of each year as she had been doing since 1982. She brought her own distinctive spirit and goals to the English Department, especially to her students in the Creative Writing program. After her retirement from Stanford in 1993, she did several benefits and poetry readings a year in both the United States and Europe. She endeavored, in spite of declining health, to keep up her correspondence with other poets and her many friends. She died of complications due to lymphoma on December 20, 1997.

Levertov strongly believed that inherited tendencies and the cultural ambiance of her own family were strong factors in her own development as a person and as a poet. She tells us in The Poet in the World that she believes her early poem "Illustrious Ancestors" reveals a "definite and peculiar destiny" she and her sister Olga shared by having among their ancestors two men who were living during the same period (late 1700s and 1800s) but in very different cultures. They had "preoccupations which gave them a basic kinship had they known one another and had [they] been able to cross the barriers of religious prejudice."
 
The poet’s father, Paul Levertoff, was a descendant of Schneour Zalman, "The Rav of Northern White Russia" who founded the Habad branch of Hasidism. Another ancestor in her mother’s line was Angell Jones of Mold, a tailor, teacher, and preacher to whom Daniel Owens, the "Welsh Dickens," was apprenticed. The shop of Angell Jones’s son (the poet’s great uncle) served as a kind of literary and intellectual salon in the 1870s
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Paul Levertoff was a Russian Jewish scholar who converted and later became an Anglican priest. He wrote throughout his life about connections between Judaism and Christianity and welcomed Jews at liturgies at St. George’s, Bloomsbury, and helped Jewish refugees in London during World War II.

Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff, the poet’s mother, was raised a Congregationalist and was, like her husband, involved with political and human rights issues. She canvassed on behalf of the League of Nations Union and supported the rights of German and Austrian refugees from 1933 onward. An interest in humanitarian politics came early into Levertov’s consciousness, so the fact that she was a long-time activist for peace and justice is not surprising. While some critics regarded poetry and politics as conflicting spheres, she tells us in "‘Invocations of Humanity’: Denise Levertov’s Poetry of Emotion and Belief" that she regarded them as organically and necessarily connected.