Life & Wisdom Quote by Philip Levine

There is swagger in that opening clause, but it’s the rueful kind: “For sure” sounds like a guy insisting to himself, after the fact, that he really did believe it. Levine frames his younger self as “the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion,” and the self-mythologizing is deliberate. It’s not just ambition; it’s a working-class theology of art, where the factory floor, the lunch pail, the tired hands are worthy of preservation in language. “Save” is the key verb: not celebrate, not depict, but rescue. Levine casts the everyday as something constantly threatened by erasure.

The subtext is an argument with literary culture’s default settings. Canon-making has always had a class bias, privileging the heroic, the refined, the exceptional. Levine’s persona pushes back with a counter-epic: the ordinary as the real drama. That stance fits his Detroit-rooted biography and his larger project across books like They Feed They Lion and What Work Is, where labor isn’t scenery; it’s destiny, it’s voice, it’s a kind of moral weather.

But the sentence is also a gentle dismantling of youthful certainty. “Once thought of myself as” admits that this savior fantasy didn’t survive intact. The line acknowledges the limits of poetry’s power while still defending its impulse: poems can’t halt oblivion, but they can complicate it, name it, make forgetting harder. Levine’s intent lands in that tension: the desire to archive lives that history treats as disposable, and the adult recognition that the archive is always incomplete.