Philip Levine was born in Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit on Jan. 10, 1928. It was a metrically auspicious birth date — the spondee “ONE, TEN” resounding like slaps on a baby’s bottom, the anapest “twenty-EIGHT” hurtling toward the future. Mr. Levine would use the date in a poem, “Let Me Begin Again”:

The sailors have stumbled

off toward the bars or the bright houses.

The captain closes his log and falls asleep.

1/10’28. Tonight I shall enter my life

after being at sea for ages, quietly,

in a hospital named for an automobile.

Mr. Levine’s parents were Russian Jewish immigrants without much money. As he later said, his childhood was shaped by several signal events, among them the Depression, the death of his father when Philip was 5 and an infatuation with poetry that began when he was in his teens.

Image Mr. Levine in 1995, after learning that “The Simple Truth” had won the Pulitzer. Credit... Billy Kingsley/Vanderbilt University

Another event was the Spanish Civil War, in which many of young Mr. Levine’s ardent anti-fascist neighbors went off to fight and from which not all of them came back. The experience would inform many of his poems, including one of his most famous, “Francisco, I’ll Bring You Red Carnations.” Collected in “7 Years From Somewhere” (1979), the poem is an elegy for the anarchist leader Francisco Ascaso, who was killed in the fighting in Barcelona in 1936. It reads in part:

Here in the great cemetery

behind the fortress of Barcelona

I have come once more to see

the graves of my fallen. ...

For two there are floral

displays, but Ascaso faces

eternity with only a stone.

Maybe as it should be. He was

a stone, a stone and a blade,

the first grinding and sharpening

the other.

Starting at 14, Mr. Levine held a series of industrial jobs: working in a soap factory, hefting cases of soft drinks at a bottling plant, manning a punch press at Chevrolet Gear and Axle and operating a jackhammer at Detroit Transmission. A great many poems sprang from this experience, including “Growth,” from “What Work Is,” which opens:

In the soap factory where I worked