Levine, Philip 1928–

Levine is an important American poet. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 9-12, rev. ed.)

[In Not This Pig] I found nothing to excite me and a good bit to make me gloomy. I think both the themes and the devices are pretty dull stuff. The business of sharing the deprivations of one's fellow man, and then discovering in a poem that one has thereby become the fellow man's brother—this seems to me such a commonplace … that it can only be successfully reiterated in some kind of prosodic tour de force. The necessity of exploring the Jewish heritage and laying it both against one's life as a person and a father, and against one's exposure to the country that built the death camps, I can certainly understand; yet it leaves me sympathetic but cool. The indefatigable concern for the squalor and pitiableness of the human condition—with a mild sermon on the need for dignity despite all—seems to me here to...

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