"What Were They Like" is one of Denise Levertov's many anti-war poems. However, before she wrote about the Vietnam War, she addressed other political topics in her poetry. For example, “During the Eichmann Trial” (1961), described the trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, who played a major role in the Holocaust. The poem explored the question of how people learn to dehumanize each other and the devastating effects of this on the world. She thought that empathy was the best antidote to dehumanization: if we can see each other as fully human, it is much harder to kill each other. Fellow poets criticized Levertov's ideas. George Oppen argued that the poem was "sentimental" because it failed to take the question of evil seriously.
In her 1967 collection The Sorrow Dance, in which "What Were They Like?" was published, Levertov has other political poems. The most famous of these is "Life at War." The poem was first published in Poetry magazine in 1966. In this year, U.S. involvement in Vietnam escalated. American troops in the country exceeded 200,000 and President Johnson began a bombing campaign against North Vietnam. At the same time, opposition to the war in the U.S. grew. Levertov and her husband Mitchell Goodman became heavily involved in the anti-war movement. They helped to organize the Artists Protest Against the Vietnam War campaign.
"Life at War" describes the heavy emotional and physical consequences of war. In the poem, she laments that human beings "whose music excels the music of birds" and who are infinitely creative and compassionate are also capable of gruesome acts of violence. The poem tries to shock readers into the reality of the war through images like "the scheduled breaking open of breasts" and "the entrails of still-alive babies." She used data about the effects of bombs in Vietnam from the Medical Committee for Human Rights in the poem. Her friend and fellow poet Robert Duncan was critical of "Life at War." In an interview, he stated: "[Levertov]’ll be writing about the war and suddenly—in one of the earlier poems that’s most shocking—you get a flayed penis, and...when she reads it you get an effect and tone of disgusted sensuality." Duncan argued that Levertov's images were inappropriate and revealed more about her own psychology than the war.
In 1971, Levertov published To Stay Alive, a book of poetry focused entirely on her anti-war activism and the people she met in the movement. The book was met with mixed reviews from critics who thought she had brought too much politics into her poetry. After the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Levertov's poetry took a different turn. It began to focus more on ecological, romantic, and religious themes. However, Levertov still occasionally discussed political topics ranging from nuclear warfare and American involvement in Central America to climate change.
