Denise Levertov never went to school. She was born in Ilford, just east of London, and taught at home by her parents: her father, Paul Levertoff, a Russian Jewish scholar who had become a Christian and an Anglican priest, and her Welsh mother, Beatrice, who read aloud to the family from the great Victorian novels. The house was full of books, visitors and political argument.

She knew early what she wanted to be. At twelve she sent some of her poems to T. S. Eliot, who wrote back a long letter of advice. During the Second World War she worked as a civilian nurse in London, and in 1946 she published her first book of poems. The next year she married an American writer, Mitchell Goodman, and in 1948 they moved to the United States.

In America her poetry changed. She read William Carlos Williams, who became a friend and mentor, and she fell in with the poets around Black Mountain College, such as Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Her poems grew plainer and more open, attending closely to ordinary things: a kitchen, a walk, a tree, a moment of noticing. She believed that every poem had its own natural shape, waiting to be found.

Then came the war in Vietnam. Levertov and Goodman became active in the antiwar movement, and Goodman was among those prosecuted with Dr Benjamin Spock in 1968 for urging young men to resist the draft. Her poetry turned toward protest, in books like The Sorrow Dance (1967) and Relearning the Alphabet (1970). Some critics, and even her friend Duncan, felt she had let politics overwhelm her art, and the disagreement ended one of the great friendships in American poetry. She did not back down.

She taught for many years, at Tufts and then at Stanford, and spent her last decade in Seattle, writing about Mount Rainier, which she could see from her window. In middle age she had been drawn back toward faith, and late in life she became a Catholic. She died in 1997.