A Study Guide for Denise Levertov's "What Were They Like?"

What Were They Like?

Denise Levertov

1967

Introduction

What Were They Like? is a poem by twentieth-century British-born American poet Denise Levertov. It was first published in her collection The Sorrow Dance in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, when there was a growing antiwar movement in the United States. Levertov was associated with the antiwar movement, and her poem is one of a number she wrote during the mid- to late 1960s opposing the war. Through the use of two speakers, the poem suggests that Vietnamese culture has been wiped out by the ferocity of the war, and no one can fully remember what it was like. Antiwar activists at the time believed that the methods employed by the US military as it prosecuted the war with ever-growing hitech weaponry might indeed, if such methods were to continue for long, annihilate an entire culture in South Vietnam. The poem is notable not only for its unusual structure, in which six numbered questions are followed by six answers numbered as to which question they respond to, but for its evocation of a rich Vietnamese culture. What Were They Like? also serves as a testament to the moral conscience aroused in many people in the United States as the Vietnam War continued to escalate through the 1960s with no apparent end in sight.

Author Biography

Levertov was born in Ilford, Essex, England, on October 24, 1923. Her father, Paul Philip Levert-off, was a Russian Jew who converted to Christianity. Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones, was Welsh. Growing up in a bookish household, Levertov and her sister Olga were educated at home by their mother. Both parents regularly read aloud to their children, and Levertov read plenty of poetry for herself. As a child she also attended ballet school. From 1943