फिलिप लवीन / Philip Levine
“A large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland” according to Edward Hirsch in the New York Times Book Review, Philip Levine is one of the elder statesmen of contemporary American poetry. He was born in the industrial city of Detroit to parents of Russian Jewish origin 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.
He is the author of twenty books of poetry which includes Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Simpler Truth. He has also published a collection of essays, The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography (1994), edited The Essential Keats (1987), and co-edited and translated two books: Off the Map: Selected Poems of Gloria Fuertes (with Ada Long, 1984) and Tarumba: The Selected Poems of Jaime Sabines (with Ernesto Trejo, 1979).