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Over the years poets have emerged with different styles, striking every reader some how. Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1928, Philip Levine has molded his image as a tough working-class poet who writes upon past experiences and the feelings provoked. His own family problems and other problems, such as the war in Vietnam, helped Levine develop his poetry. To say the least he took bad luck and made it inspiration (Gioia, npn). The crummy jobs that young Levine agonizingly endured would have seemed natural to most working class kids (Gioia, npn), but to Levine they created a bad vision of becoming poor, a middle-class persons nightmare.
Philip Levine describes immigrant life in a village of his past as a youth and uses a lot of imagery to develop his meaning in Reinventing America. Levine's reflection upon his life as a young man and his uncles past experiences are one way that Levine displays his past experiences. Reinventing America is filled with imagery that has Levine painting a portrait of village life, his youth, and also the uncles past giving us a sense that things over time stay the same and generations live similar lives. Levine begins the poem drawing a picture of the boys neighborhood. He writes on the size of the city and how you could walk around for sometime and not get anywhere.
The speaker tells of the hardships of the neighborhood, and how he stayed in his own part avoiding the boys with animal hungers (Levine, 917), which he means is the local bullys. He goes on writing how he would bum cigarettes and wish to go home with a beautiful woman. This boys life reflects his uncles life and the boy knows how time is flying by, and before long he too will be like his half blind uncle. The uncle, who is married to an upset woman, spends a lot of time making calls on his radio. Levine tells of how as a boy he would sneak down to see his uncle and he would teach him things like boxing.
Levine then paints a portrait of his uncles past and more imagery comes into play as he gives an image of his uncle while he is downstairs. Levine describes the uncle as wiry in his boxers shorts and high topped boots, chewing on a cigar, the one dead eye catching the. light (Levine, 917). This draws a picture of this man with one eye who has obviously been through a lot, and who is also formerly a boxer. The uncle reminisces about the road and sea and his far-from-saintly acts and is portrayed as a man with same feelings and experiences as his nephew current life. The uncle was a tough man and the poem tells of how he taught the boy to fight and his jail time and how tough it made him.
Levine writes the months in jail had taught him a man had only his honor and his ass to protect (Levine, 918), then goes on to describe his uncle teaching him to box. Levine then takes us back to the neighborhood, painting a larger portrait of the village life. He writes on the six bakeries, four barber shops, a five and dime, twenty beer gardens, a catholic church with a shul next door where we studied the Talmud-Torah (Levine, 918), the Talmud-Torah is in the Jewish religion leaving us to believe that the boy is Jewish and gives us a picture of a Jewish neighborhood. Levine goes on to describe the way feelings get tucked away and memories are displaced forgetting how it was and how it is the same for every generation. His uncle is also reminded of his youth, leaving an eye gone, a long fresh, vivid scar running to touch a mouth (Levine, 918).
In the last three lines he reveals that It was merely village life, exactly what our parents left in Europe brought to America with pure fidelity (Levine, 918), these lines bring us the conclusion that the life brought from Europe is a similar life led by the boy, a village life. This poem lets me know that my parents and their parents went through similar challenges and similar problems as me. This poem is a good display of how human nature doesnt change and life stays pretty much the same. Levine shows the fact that as a boy he saw his life was leading in the same direction as his uncles. He was having similar experiences that were leading a similar life as his uncles. Levine's use of imagery paints the portrait of the American village life that is very similar to that of the European village life when compared.
The American village life is a reflection of Europe's own villages.
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Research essay sample on Imagery In Reinventing America
