Alice Van Wart teaches literature and writing in the Department of Continuing Education at the

University ofToronto. She has published two books of poetry and has written articles on modern and contemporary literature. In the following essay, Van Wart explains how Levine "uses a complex dual perspective" to look back upon an event from his childhood.

Philip Levine has written 17 books of poetry, studied with John Berryman and Yvor Winters, held a fellowship in poetry atStanford University, won numerous prizes including the Pulitzer and the National Book award, and earned his living as a college professor from the late 1950s to his retirement. Yet his roots remain firmly in his pre-academic and literary life. Born in 1928 into a lower middle-class Jewish family, Levine worked as a manual laborer in Detroit where he formed a strong identification with the men and women he met as an industrial worker...