Contents: IntroductionPoem Summary Themes Style Critical Overview Criticism Sources For Further Study |
Author Biography
The second of three children — first of identical twins — Philip Levine was born in 1928. His parents, Harry Levine and Esther Gertrude Priscol were Russian-Jewish immigrants who had met in Detroit, the city of Philip’s birth. He grew up among that city’s working class, and although he received a B.A. in 1950 and an M.A. in 1955 from Wayne State University, he was no stranger to manual labor. Levine worked in a number of Detroit’s automobile factories while earning his degrees. His experiences during this time helped to solidify the allegiances he already felt to the working poor and manifested themselves in his poetry which damned greedy capitalists as frequently as it praised the “lowly” wage-earner.
Levine’s own desire to be a writer was in large part formed by the hardscrabble working world in which he grew up. Though he admired and paid homage to the working-class heroes of Detroit’s factories, he himself desired a different life. Levine took an M.F.A. in creative writing in 1957 from the University of Iowa and won a Stanford University Jones Fellowship in poetry shortly thereafter. In 1958 he became a full-time faculty member at Fresno State College. By 1979 when “Starlight” appeared in Ashes, Levine had established his reputation as one of America’s leading poets, having published a number of well-received poetry collections and having been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He had also fathered three sons of his own, and poems about his sons, his father, and other family members pepper his collections.
Like “Starlight,” many of these poems are narratives. Levine sees his task as poet to tell stories as well as he can. He claims that a successful poem is one in which the words become transparent and the reader is immersed in the world being described. One of the United States’s most decorated poets, Philip Levine lives in Fresno, California and New York City, and teaches at New York University.
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