Art & Creativity Quote by Philip Levine

Trying to sound like Cesar Vallejo is the quickest way to reveal you have nothing like Vallejo to say. Levine’s line is a warning disguised as praise: Vallejo’s voice is so fused to his psyche, his history, his nerves, that imitation turns into ventriloquism. You don’t borrow that diction; it borrows you, and then exposes you.

The jab at “fraud” isn’t really about plagiarism. It’s about the counterfeit feeling that shows up when a poet reaches for someone else’s intensity as a shortcut to depth. Vallejo’s poems carry the pressure of lived catastrophe - poverty, exile, political violence, the metaphysical grief of being human in a century that made suffering feel industrial. His syntax fractures because experience fractures. His tenderness feels strange because it has to survive horror. Copy the surface traits - the abrupt leaps, the wounded grandeur, the grim humor - and you’re left with costume jewelry: recognizable, shiny, dead.

Levine, a poet of labor and American working-class life, is also policing a kind of workshop habit: the reverent mimicry that passes for “influence.” The subtext is almost ethical. Vallejo’s “too much himself” means his style is inseparable from a particular moral and emotional authority. If you try to wear it, the mismatch is immediate: the voice doesn’t fit your body.

What works here is the blunt second-person pivot - “not you” - which turns literary criticism into a dare. Admire Vallejo all you want. The only non-fraudulent response is to become “too much yourself” in return.