What Work Is
Place on List:
III. Period: 1960 - 2009
3. Primary Texts: Poetry
Philip
Levine. What
Work Is.
(1992)
Supporting References:
- Parini, Jay. "Levine, Philip." The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. : Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference. 2003. Date Accessed 16 Aug. 2013
This article
references the poet and not the text specifically.
“Levine, Philip (1928– ), was born in Detroit, Michigan, and
educated in local schools and at Wayne State University. He is now
Professor of English at California State University in Fresno. Levine
has periodically lived in Spain, a country whose people, landscape,
and history remain a strong presence in his poems.
A prolific poet, Levine has published
collections at regular intervals since On the Edge appeared
in 1963. His earliest poems were relatively formal in character, but
Not This Pig (1968), his second book, marks the emergence
of Levine's mature style, characterized by a haunting lyricism, an
inward sense of the natural world (frequently invoked for symbolic
purposes), and a strong identification with ethnic and working-class
issues. There is an undertone of rage and defiance throughout this,
and other, volumes. (In ‘Animals Are Passing from Our Lives’,
for instance, a pig refuses to be butchered, crying in the last
line: ‘No. Not this pig.’)
Levine is particularly well known for
his poems set in Detroit, a blighted urban landscape about which he
has written with visionary intensity. 1933 (1974) was his
most explicitly autobiographical work, in which family members and
the physical geography of Detroit were uniquely invoked. ‘Letters
for the Dead’, ‘Uncle’, and ‘1933’ are among the finest
poems of his maturity, followed in The Names of the Lost
(1976) by more poems set in Detroit, such as ‘Belle Isle, 1949’,
which describes a young couple who ‘baptize’ themselves in the
polluted Detroit River with its ‘brine | of cars parts, dead fish,
stolen bicycles, | melted snow’.
Levine's strong identification with
the antifascist side of the Spanish Civil War has given his poetry a
decidedly left-populist political slant, as in his elegy for a
Republican soldier, ‘To P.L., 1916–1937’, which appeared in
They Feed They Lion (1972), one of Levine's strongest
collections. Another strong poem focused on this period is ‘On the
Murder of Lieutenant Jose Del Castillo by the Falangist Bravo
Martinez, July 12, 1936’—a vivid historical piece, published in
The Names of the Lost. Here, as in Levine's best work
generally, he re-creates a particular milieu with freshness and
originality.
Though he has written well about Spain
and Detroit, Levine has lived much of his adult life in northern
California, and a number of his poems reflect the dry dust and hot
climate of the Fresno Valley, as in ‘A Sleepless Night’, which
begins: ‘April, and the last of the plum blossoms | scatters on
the black grass | before dawn’. Levine is, ultimately, a religious
poet, and he invests whatever landscape he chooses to write
about—geographical or mental—with a fervent spirituality. A
volume called Ashes (1979) contains many of his most
explicitly religious poems, many of which explore his Jewish roots,
as in ‘On a Drawing by Flavio’, which summons the image of the
Rabbi of Auschwitz, who ‘bows his head and prays | for us all’.
Levine's Selected Poems (New
York, 1984) is a major collection of the poet's work. Recent books
include Sweet Will (1985) and A Walk with Tom
Jefferson (1988—both New York). For criticism, see Cry of the
Human, by Ralph J. Mills, Jr. (Urbana, Ill., 1975).”
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