Critical Essay | Critical Review by Calvin Bedient

Critical Review by Calvin Bedient

SOURCE: "Four American Poets," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXXIV, No. 2, Spring, 1976, pp. 355-59.

In the following excerpt, Bedient asserts that Levine's poetry has shifted from "bereft and skeptical" towards romanticism.

The drama of Levine's career lies in his movement away from his origins—industrial and Jewish immigrant, bereft and skeptical—toward American romanticism, that faith of the senses in an intimate bigness beyond even the bigness of the land. From Detroit, a "city pouring fire," to "the one stove of earth"—such has been his progress.

Hayden Carruth reviews Levine's Not This Pig:

To distinguish exactly the quality of Philip Levine's poems is not easy. He falls outside our categories. In some respects his horror poems, reciting the barbarities of our time, seem old-fashioned, reverberations from the days of early Jarrell and Shapiro, twenty-five years ago when we were all so intent upon, for example, the painting of Hieronymus Bosch....
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