Philip Levine, poet of drudgery
Lee Siegel explains why this is the perfect time for Philip Levine's brand of anger
By More Intelligent Life
FAME, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote, is the sum of misapprehensions that accrue around a name. No sooner had the announcement been made that Philip Levine was America's next poet laureate than the misapprehensions started rolling in.
“Best known for his big-hearted, Whitmanesque poems about working-class Detroit,” proclaimed the New York Times. “His poetry taps into memories of his time on an assembly line, a sort of transcript of a life spent hard at work,” amiably reported the Washington Post. The AP described him as having “for decades chronicled, celebrated and worried about blue collar life.” Even the man who anointed Levine America's national poet, James Billington of the Library of Congress, seemed to share in this general misperception. Levine's astringent poems of men and women doomed to manual labour, Billington said, were “about the hard work we do to make sense of our lives.”
It's true that in recent years, as the 83-year-old Levine has aged, his poems have become gentler and more elegiac. But the essence of Levine's poetry, the quality that makes his work original and unforgettable, is the very antithesis of big-hearted and Whitmanesque. His early poems are cutting, despairing accounts of the type of futile, life-draining work that lacks dignity and purpose. Attending night school at Michigan's Wayne State University while working in an automobile factory during the day, Levine lived out America's promise and its bitterness at the same time. He turned the intimate, confessional style of Robert Lowell and especially John Berryman—with whom he had studied at Wayne State—into a kind of colloquial, prophetic harshness.
Discover more
An American musical about mental health takes off in China
The protagonist of “Next to Normal” has bipolar disorder. The show is encouraging audiences to open up about their own well-being
Sue Williamson’s art of resistance
Aesthetics and politics are powerfully entwined in the 50-year career of the South African artist
What happened to the “Salvator Mundi”?
The recently rediscovered painting made headlines in 2017 when it fetched $450m at auction. Then it vanished again