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Philip Levine Quotes


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Quotes by Philip Levine

Showing 1-10 of 24 Quotes by 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

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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.

~Philip Levine

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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

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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

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

~Philip Levine

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My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

~Philip Levine

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

~Philip Levine

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Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

~Philip Levine

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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

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The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

~Philip Levine

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Poet

Born: January 10th, 1928

Died: February 14th, 2015

Links

Find Philip Levine on Amazon

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