There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up

The poet Philip Levine once proclaimed with a voice both humble and resolute: “There’ll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.” In this confession we hear not only the testimony of one man, but the echo of a whole class of humanity—the working people, whose sweat and calloused hands have built the world yet are too often forgotten in the halls of art. Levine, born in Detroit among the hum of factories and the smell of metal and grease, saw poetry not as a flight from labor but as a consecration of it. His words remind us that memory is not merely a record of the past—it is the soul’s loyalty to those who shaped it.

The ancients would have understood this vow. For the bards of old did not sing only of kings and gods; they sang also of shepherds, blacksmiths, and farmers, whose toil sustained the city and whose endurance was no less heroic. When Hesiod wrote of the farmer plowing the stubborn earth, or when Virgil in the Georgics praised the rural labors of Italy, they too were poets of memory, preserving the dignity of those whose hands carved life out of stone and soil. Levine stands in this same lineage, declaring that the poet must not abandon the voices of the humble, for they are the very root of his song.

Consider the story of the American worker during the Great Depression. While Wall Street crumbled and factories fell silent, countless men and women bent their backs to pick crops, lay rails, and stitch garments for pennies. Few wrote of them, yet they endured, their lives forming the unseen foundation of survival. It was the folk singers—Woody Guthrie with his battered guitar—who gave them voice, much as Levine would decades later. Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” and Levine’s verses are kin, for both arose from the soil of toil, both were offerings of memory to the working spirit.

In Levine’s words, there is also a defiance. To be a poet of memory is to refuse erasure. History often elevates the powerful and discards the common. But the poet can resist, the poet can carve remembrance into stone. Just as the builders of the pyramids are remembered less than their pharaohs, so the men and women who forged steel or stitched shoes risk vanishing from the chronicles of culture. Levine’s art restores their presence; it weaves them back into the fabric of history. His poetry becomes a kind of justice, a recognition long denied.

The heroic lesson here is that poetry is not only the voice of beauty but the shield of memory. To write of those who toil is to crown them with the honor they deserve. It is to say: your labor is not invisible; your struggle is not forgotten. Just as Homer made Achilles immortal by singing his name, so Levine makes immortal the nameless men and women of Detroit’s foundries, assembly lines, and kitchens. This is no small task—it is an act of reverence and love, born from gratitude for the world they gave him.

So what shall we take from Levine’s wisdom? That each of us is also a poet of memory, whether or not we write verses. The way we remember our parents, our teachers, our neighbors—the way we carry their sacrifices within us—this too is poetry. We honor them by speaking their stories, by refusing to let their labor vanish into silence. To be forgetful is to betray; to remember is to sanctify.

Practical actions flow from this truth. Speak of those who shaped you, even if the world does not know their names. Tell your children of the grandfather who rose at dawn to work the fields, of the mother who sewed by lamplight to clothe her family. Write down their stories, sing their songs, carry their lessons in your heart. In doing so, you become, like Levine, a poet of memory, weaving the lives of the humble into the enduring fabric of human history.

Thus, Philip Levine’s declaration is more than autobiography—it is a summons. To be human is to remember, and to remember rightly is to honor the working hands that built the world. Let none of us forget them, for their labor is the soil in which our lives are rooted, and their memory is the song that must never be silenced.