Philip Levine Summary

Philip Levine was born in Detroit to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. After graduation from Wayne State University in 1950, he worked at a series of menial jobs and then left Detroit "for good." He m... Read more

In the following essay, Mills traces the development of Levine's themes from On the Edge to Red Dust and They Feed They Lion. We livethe way we are—PL., "The Sadness of Lemons&#x... Read more

In the following review, Stitt compares 7 Years from Somewhere with Ashes, contending Ashes is a more powerful and imaginative work. Because lyric poetry is spoken in a direct and seemingly intimate v... Read more

In the following review, Frost discusses Levine 's poetic influences and favorably reviews New Selected Poems and What Work Is. I Exceptional poets come in two kinds: those whose territory is s... Read more

In the following review, Hugo lauds Levine's poetry collection, The Names of the Lost, stressing in particular the poems' emotional depth. Philip Levine knows a few things so well that h... Read more

In the following review of New Selected Poems and What Work Is, Frost not only considers the poems of these two books, but also ranges over the spectrum of Levine's wider output and poetic care... Read more

In the following review, Gioia considers The Bread of Time, Levine's collection of autobiographical essays. Though Gioia praises certain facets of the work, he also criticizes it for certain sh... Read more

In the following essay, originally published in Boulevard, Volumes 25 and 26, Stein discusses Levine's historical consciousness. He analyzes Levine's insistence that the past is in const... Read more

In the following excerpt, Grosholz discusses Levine's focus on and praise of the ordinary. … Philip Levine's poems in One for the Rose often begin in the midst of the ordinary: &#... Read more

In the following essay, Marchant discusses the spirit of anarchism in Levine's poetry. Not many people in the United States would call themselves anarchists, but the poet Philip Levine does. In... Read more

In the following review, Marchant considers Levine's humanistic faith and the nature of spirituality in his poetry. In a dozen books over the last twenty-five years, one of Philip Levine'... Read more

In the following review, Gregerson considers some of the major themes in Levine's poetry, both in this collection and elsewhere. New York, Detroit, Fresno, Medford: from a shifting home front, ... Read more