Philip Levine Was a Poet of the Working Class
The late poet laureate Philip Levine gave us a unique and loving set of portraits of the American working class. Six years after his death on Valentine’s Day, let’s mourn his absence and celebrate his work.
Philip Levine was an American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. (Photo by Frances Levine)
On Valentine’s Day 2015, Philip Levine, former poet laureate of the United States and longtime English professor at California State University, Fresno, passed away from pancreatic cancer. The New York Times obituary characterized his work as “vibrantly, angrily and often painfully alive with the sound, smell and sinew of heavy manual labor.”
Levine told Bill Moyers in 2013 that he was cautious about writing from a place of anger, but that the emotion nevertheless informed some of his writing. When Moyers asked Levine what made him most angry, Levine answered plainly: “American capitalism. Its heartlessness. And American racism. The conditions that are imposed upon the poor by the rich . . . you never get over it.”
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