SOURCE: "What We See and Feel and Are," in The Southern Review, Vol. 28, No. 2, Spring, 1992, pp. 433-36.

In the following excerpt, Hosmer counters criticism that espouses the view that Levine is not a poet but "simply a memoir writer in prose."

Ever since the publication of his first major book, Not This Pig (1968), Philip Levine has acquired ardent champions and severe critics. The latter often single out his limited range of subject matter and style, some going so far as to say that what he writes isn't poetry at all ("simply a memoir writer in prose," said Helen Vendler, who asked of One for the Rose [1981], "Is there any compelling reason why it should be called poetry?"). Well, yes there is, if you're willing to be flexible in developing an enlarged, somewhat nontraditional and nonmusical understanding of what poetry can be. Though he once wrote a poem "after...