35+ Philip Levine Quotes On Art, Poetry And World

Philip Levine was an American poet from Detroit, Michigan. He was known for his poems about working-class life and the struggles of the working class. He was a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2011 to 2012. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Philip Levine on love, life, art.

Top 10 Philip Levine Quotes

1. Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme...they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
2. The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
3. I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.
4. My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.
5. There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
6. Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.
7. I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.
8. Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.
9. Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.
10. My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

Philip Levine Short Quotes

• I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.
• I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.
• I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.
• My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.
• You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.
• I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.
• How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

Philip Levine Quotes About Work

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity. — Philip Levine

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity. — Philip Levine

It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work. — Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes About Poet

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion. — Philip Levine

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet. — Philip Levine

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet. — Philip Levine

Listen to these young poets and you'll discover the voice of the present and hear the voice of the future before the future is even here. — Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes About Poem

If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem. — Philip Levine

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote. — Philip Levine

You have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn't expect to say. And you look at the poem and you realize, 'That is truly what I felt.' That is truly what I saw. — Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes About Write

I write what's given me to write. — Philip Levine

My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs. — Philip Levine

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you. — Philip Levine

Philip Levine Famous Quotes And Sayings

I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity. — Philip Levine

Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don't know, nothing I haven't lived over and over, and that's everything. — Philip Levine

I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand. — Philip Levine

I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life. — Philip Levine

I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others. — Philip Levine

Life Lessons by Philip Levine

1. Philip Levine's work emphasizes the importance of hard work and resilience in the face of adversity. He often focuses on the struggles of the working class and celebrates the dignity of labor.
2. His poetry also highlights the beauty of everyday moments, reminding us to appreciate the small joys of life and to savor the present.
3. Through his work, Levine encourages us to recognize the value of our own experiences and to strive for a better future.