Philip Levine, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose intimate portraits of blue-collar life were grounded in personal experience and political conscience, died Saturday. Levine was 87.
Levine, the country’s poet laureate in 2011-2012, died at his home in Fresno, California, of pancreatic and liver cancer, his wife said Sunday.
A native of Detroit and son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Levine was profoundly shaped by his working-class childhood and years spent in jobs ranging from driving a truck to assembling parts at a Chevrolet plant.
Although he taught in several colleges, he had little in common with the academic poets of his time. He was not abstract or insular or digressive. He consciously modeled himself after Walt Whitman as a poet of everyday experience and cosmic wonder, writing tactile, conversational poems about his childhood, living in Spain, marriage and parenting and poetry itself.
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“I can remember feeling full of the power of a just cause and believing that power would not fail me. It failed me or I failed it. We didn’t really change the way Americans lived, unless you take hairstyles seriously,” he once said.
“I’m not a man of action; it finally comes down to that. I’m not so profoundly moral that I can often overcome my fears of prison or torture or exile or poverty. I’m a contemplative person who goes in the corner and writes.” Levine was married twice, to Patty Kanterman and to Frances J. Artley, his wife since 1954.
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AP National Writer Hillel Italie reported from New York. AP Correspondent Scott Smith reported from Fresno.
