Rainer Maria Rilke Poems

Philip Levine, poet of drudgery

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 . 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.

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