Starlight | Looking Back on Van Wart's Childhood
In the following essay, Van Wart explains how Levine "uses a complex dual perspective" to look back upon an event from his childhood.
Philip Levine has written 17 books of poetry, studied with John Berryman and Yvor Winters, held a fellowship in poetry at Stanford University, won numerous prizes including the Pulitzer and the National Book award, and earned his living as a college professor from the late 1950s to his retirement. Yet his roots remain firmly in his pre-academic and literary life. Born in 1928 into a lower middle-class Jewish family, Levine worked as a manual laborer in Detroit where he formed a strong identification with the men and women he met as an industrial worker. His work often depicts the bleak,...
[The entire page is 1537 words long]
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