Aging & Wisdom Quote by Philip Levine

There is a small, almost offhand cruelty in Levine's line: the way literary culture embalms poets by era rather than by appetite. "Too old" lands like a shrug, but it carries the sting of being miscast. Not as a bad poet, not as irrelevant, but as the wrong kind of story. The "young poet" is a genre the culture loves because it flatters our myth of talent arriving fully formed, raw and photogenic, before the compromises of adulthood. Levine refuses that script.

The passive voice matters: "to be written about". He's not talking about writing poems; he's talking about being packaged. Critics, profiles, prize committees, and reading series need a narrative handle, and youth is an easy one. It promises discovery, urgency, the feeling of being early to something. Levine, who built a career out of attention to work, class, and the hard facts of time, exposes how the attention economy treats age as aesthetic information.

The line also carries a defense of late style. If you can't be marketed as "young", you can either fade into the dignified background or insist that the present tense still belongs to you. Levine chooses insistence. He implies that art doesn't stop evolving when the biography stops being cute. Underneath the complaint is a dare: write about the poet I am now, not the origin story you wish I still fit.