Denise Levertov's "Histrionics".

This article analyzes Denise Levertov's antiwar poetry as a challenge to mid-20th-century assumptions about the limits of bearing witness to war, particularly in relation to the Vietnam War and Cold War domesticity. It contrasts Levertov's imaginative and critical approach to wartime witnessing—which crosses geographic, temporal, and experiential boundaries—with George Oppen's Objectivist insistence on poetry grounded strictly in firsthand, "authentic" experience. Levertov's work critiques the gendered and domestic motifs used by the Cold War national security state to justify violence, revealing how sanitized domesticity obscures the realities of distant war. While acknowledging the problematic aspects of Levertov's representation of Vietnamese suffering, the article emphasizes her poetry's role in exposing the ideological frameworks that normalize perpetual war and limit public and poetic engagement with its consequences.