Philip Levine

Philip Levine (born January 10, 1928, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.—died February 14, 2015, Fresno, California) was an American poet of urban working-class life. He won numerous prestigious awards and served as U.S. poet laureate (2011–12).

Levine was of Russian Jewish descent and began working in Detroit’s automobile factories at age 14. He studied at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) (B.A., 1950; M.A., 1955) and the University of Iowa (M.F.A., 1957). His influences included John Berryman and Robert Lowell, both of whom taught workshops that Levine attended at Iowa. He worked at a series of industrial jobs before he began teaching literature and creative writing at California State University in Fresno (1958–92). In addition, he was poet in residence at a number of colleges and universities.

In his poetry Levine attempted to speak for those whose intelligence, emotions, and imagination are constrained by tedious and harsh working conditions. His poems offer graphic images of gray cities, meaningless talk and actions, subtle humiliations, dispossession, and despair. He wrote in free verse and in lines of variable rhythm, and his language was unambiguous. Despite Levine’s concern with modern life’s brutalities, he also wrote poems of love and joy. His numerous poetry collections include On the Edge (1963), They Feed They Lion (1972), Ashes (1979; winner of a National Book Award), and A Walk with Tom Jefferson (1988). Levine, inspired by a visit to Barcelona, wrote the poems of The Names of the Lost (1976) in honor of the loyalists who fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39).

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Levine won a second National Book Award in 1991 for his collection What Work Is, an honor that may have partly inspired the backward look that he achieved in The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography (1994, reissued 2001), a series of autobiographical essays that one critic called both elegant and tough-minded. Among his later books of poetry are the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Simple Truth (1994), filled with elegiac despair, and Unselected Poems (1997). Also in 1997 Levine became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Mercy (1999) expresses, as another critic wrote, an acceptance of reality attended by “a sort of delight.”

In the 21st century Levine published more poetry in his signature vein in the volumes Breath (2004) and News of the World (2009). From 2011 to 2012 Levine served as poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress.