American poet Billy Collins (born 1941) has worked to craft a poetic art that is accessible without being sentimental or crass.
Named poet laureate of the United States in 2001, Collins became the public face of American poetry and embarked on an ambitious effort to insert poetry--not the teaching of poetry so much as the raw material of poems themselves--into American secondary schools. His own books have enjoyed a rare combination of popular and critical success, selling tens of thousands of copies and earning Collins large advance payments unheard-of for practitioners of poetic art. A distinctive feature of Collins's career is that his serious activity as a poet began only when he was well into middle age; he published his first substantial …show more content…
He reemerged with The Apple That Astonished Paris, published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1988, the title itself indicating a new attitude in his poetry. Collins's breakthrough to national prominence came with his next book, Questions About Angels, which won the 1990 National Poetry Series competition. As a result, the book was issued by the major Morrow publishing house in 1991, giving Collins access to an audience beyond academic readers and poetry specialists. As Collins's fame grew, the university presses that issued his first books jockeyed with commercial publishers for control of his poems; the University of Pittsburgh Press, one of his early supporters, was unwilling to give up the rights to what had become some of the most profitable items in its …show more content…
He used plain language and wrote about details of everyday surroundings, but some of his poems referred obliquely to poetic classics (opening Poetry magazine, he told Teachers & Writers, was "like looking into 'Chapman's Homer,'" echoing a famous work by British poet John Keats), and he relied in general on drawing readers into his works rather than making his writing transparent. One aspect of Collins's appeal hinged on his ability to mix humor and seriousness in the same work. The title poem of The Art of Drowning imagines a drowning person who sees life flashing before his eyes, and suggests that a full-scale slide presentation would be more desirable, but later turns serious, describing the moment of death, the water's "surface now covered with the high/travel of
Named poet laureate of the United States in 2001, Collins became the public face of American poetry and embarked on an ambitious effort to insert poetry--not the teaching of poetry so much as the raw material of poems themselves--into American secondary schools. His own books have enjoyed a rare combination of popular and critical success, selling tens of thousands of copies and earning Collins large advance payments unheard-of for practitioners of poetic art. A distinctive feature of Collins's career is that his serious activity as a poet began only when he was well into middle age; he published his first substantial …show more content…
He reemerged with The Apple That Astonished Paris, published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1988, the title itself indicating a new attitude in his poetry. Collins's breakthrough to national prominence came with his next book, Questions About Angels, which won the 1990 National Poetry Series competition. As a result, the book was issued by the major Morrow publishing house in 1991, giving Collins access to an audience beyond academic readers and poetry specialists. As Collins's fame grew, the university presses that issued his first books jockeyed with commercial publishers for control of his poems; the University of Pittsburgh Press, one of his early supporters, was unwilling to give up the rights to what had become some of the most profitable items in its …show more content…
He used plain language and wrote about details of everyday surroundings, but some of his poems referred obliquely to poetic classics (opening Poetry magazine, he told Teachers & Writers, was "like looking into 'Chapman's Homer,'" echoing a famous work by British poet John Keats), and he relied in general on drawing readers into his works rather than making his writing transparent. One aspect of Collins's appeal hinged on his ability to mix humor and seriousness in the same work. The title poem of The Art of Drowning imagines a drowning person who sees life flashing before his eyes, and suggests that a full-scale slide presentation would be more desirable, but later turns serious, describing the moment of death, the water's "surface now covered with the high/travel of