For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion. — Philip Levine
There’ll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory. — 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
I have a sense that many americans, especially those like me with european or foreign parents — 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
If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn’t carried throughout the whole poem — Philip Levine