Philip levine biography
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Levine, Philip, 1928-2015
Philip Levine was born in the industrial city of Detroit to parents of Russian Jewish ursprung in 1928. Detroit was the home of Father Coughlin, a notorious anti-Semitic Catholic priest who broadcast on the radio every Sunday. He spent most of his childhood and adolescence fighting people who wanted to beat him up because he was Jewish. Identifying with anti-fascism, he progressed to a discovery of anarchism, and in particular Spanish anarchism. Spanish anarchism and anarchists are a recurring theme in Levine’s poems.
Perhaps surprisingly, the United States has been the home of a number of poets who have expressed anarchist ideas in their works, such as Kenneth Rexroth. But then igen, there were strong traditions of immigrant anarchism among Jews, Italians, Spaniards and Russians. There was the radical workers organisation, the Industrial Workers of the World. There is the libertarian tradition among intellectuals, dating back to Thoreau. And there is
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Philip Levine was a prize-winning American writer and university lecturer who rose from a working class background in Detroit to become one of his country’s greatest poets. Among many honours and awards came the ultimate prize, when he was into his eighties. In 2011 he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States, a post which he filled for two years.
He was born on the 10th January 1928 in the industrial city of Detroit, his parents both Jewish immigrants. His father, who worked in the motor parts trade, died when Philip was only five years old and the boy had to cope with an element of anti-Semitism as he grew up. He had a disruptive education where he had to work in a car factory at the age of 14 before going back to school, and then on to Detroit’s Wayne University. He was writing poetry by then and he gained a Bachelors’ degree in 1950 but, for some reason, he decided to go back to working in a car factory doing, what he called, “stupid jobs”.
His up and down
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Philip Levine
Philip Levine was born in Detroit on January 10, 1928. He was formally educated in the Detroit public school system and at Wayne University (now, Wayne State University), Michigan’s only urban public research university. After graduation, Levine worked at a number of industrial jobs, including the night shift at the Chevrolet Gear and Axle factory, reading and writing poems in his off hours.
In 1953, Levine studied at the University of Iowa, earning an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. There, Levine studied with poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman, whom Levine called his “one great mentor.”
In 1957, after teaching technical writing in Iowa City, Levine travelled to California, where he hoped to relocate with his wife and two children. Levine was welcomed by the poet Yvor Winters, who agreed to house the aspiring poet until he found a place to live, and later chose Levine for a Stanford Writing Fellowship.
Levine published his debut colle