[2][3] Philip Levine grew up in industrial Detroit, the second of three sons and the first of identical twins of Jewish immigrant parents.
"[2] The work, he later wrote, was “so heavy and monotonous that after an hour or two I was sure each night that I would never last the shift.”[8] He married his first wife, Patty Kanterman, in 1951.
[5] In 1953, he attended the University of Iowa without registering,[10] studying with, among others, poets Robert Lowell and John Berryman, the latter of whom Levine called his "one great mentor.
"[11] In 1954, he earned a mail-order master's degree with a thesis on John Keats' "Ode to Indolence,"[6] and married actress Frances J.
[16] Levine's working experience lent his poetry a profound skepticism with regard to conventional American ideals.
In his first two books, On the Edge (1963) and Not This Pig (1968), the poetry dwells on those who suddenly become aware that they are trapped in some murderous processes not of their own making.
[16] Beginning with They Feed They Lion, typically Levine's poems are free-verse monologues tending toward trimeter or tetrameter.
[16] Other collections include The Names of the Lost, A Walk with Tom Jefferson, New Selected Poems, and the National Book Award-winning What Work Is.