Billy Collins

Billy Collins – Life, Poetry, and Famous Quotes


Explore the life, style, and influence of American poet Billy Collins — from his accessible humor and everyday observations to his tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate and his most quoted lines.

Introduction

Billy Collins (born March 22, 1941) is one of America’s most beloved contemporary poets. His deceptively simple, conversational style—bathed in gentle wit and attentive observation—has made poetry approachable for many readers. He served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003 and is often credited with helping renew public interest in poetry in the early 21st century.

Early Life and Family

William James Collins was born in Manhattan, New York City, on March 22, 1941.

His parents were William Collins and Katherine Collins. His mother, a former nurse, had a love for reciting verse, and she would often recite poems on different topics—an early influence on Collins’s sense of rhythm, voice, and memory.

He attended Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, NY.

Education and Early Influences

Collins earned a B.A. in English from the College of the Holy Cross in 1963. M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside, completing these by 1971.

During his time at Riverside, Collins came under the influence of Victorian scholar Robert Peters, and also was exposed to poets like Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, and Reed Whittemore.

Academic & Teaching Career

Collins joined the faculty of Lehman College (City University of New York) in 1968, eventually becoming a Distinguished Professor of English.

He also held visiting writer and teaching roles at institutions such as Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, and at the SUNY Stony Brook Southampton MFA program.

Rise to Literary Recognition

Though Collins published throughout the 1970s and 1980s, his public recognition gained momentum in the 1990s. Pokerface appeared, followed by Video Poems (1980).

His 1988 collection, The Apple That Astonished Paris, began to solidify his poetic voice. Questions About Angels (1991), chosen by poet Edward Hirsch in the National Poetry Series, that truly raised his public profile.

Subsequent collections like The Art of Drowning (1995) and Picnic, Lightning (1998) further cemented his reputation for accessible, ironic, and emotionally resonant poetry. Picnic, Lightning became a bestseller, helping bridge the gap between academic poetry and wider readership.

Poet Laureate & Public Projects

In 2001, Collins was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate (sometimes styled as Consultant in Poetry), a post he held through 2003. Poetry 180, a project aimed at bringing daily poems to high school students (one poem for each school day). Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry.

He also served as New York State Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006.

On September 6, 2002, Collins read his poem “The Names” during a joint session of the U.S. Congress in memory of the victims of September 11. Although he initially declined to publish it, it was later included in collections such as Aimless Love.

Style, Themes & Poetic Voice

Conversational & Accessible Tone

One of Collins’s hallmarks is his conversational, approachable language. He often speaks with the reader as a companion, rather than elevating distance or obscurity.

Humor with a Touch of Surprise

Wit, irony, and gentle humor run through his poems, often drawing us in before shifting toward a deeper emotional or philosophical turn.

The Extraordinary in the Ordinary

Collins frequently turns everyday moments—waiting in line, traveling on a plane, watching nature—into windows into reflection, memory, and mortality.

Time, Memory & Loss

Underlying many of his poems is a meditation on time passed, memory fading, and the quiet ache of loss and aging.

Meta-poetic Reflection

He often writes about writing, about poems themselves—how we read them, how they resist—or submit to—interpretation.

Critics have observed that Collins’s work is “transparent on the surface yet becomes ambiguous, thought-provoking, or simply wise once the reader has peered into the depths.”

Selected Works

Here are some key collections by Billy Collins:

  • Pokerface (1977)

  • Video Poems (1980)

  • The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988)

  • Questions About Angels (1991)

  • The Art of Drowning (1995)

  • Picnic, Lightning (1998)

  • Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001)

  • Nine Horses (2002)

  • The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems (2005)

  • Ballistics (2008)

  • Horoscopes for the Dead (2011)

  • Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems (2013)

  • The Rain in Portugal (2016)

  • Whale Day and Other Poems (2020)

  • Dog Show (forthcoming, 2025)

His poem “The Art of Drowning” is frequently anthologized and praised: John Updike described it as “lovely poems … more serious than they seem.”

Legacy & Influence

  • Collins is sometimes called “the most popular poet in America” for the broad appeal of his voice.

  • His public role as Poet Laureate—and particularly the Poetry 180 initiative—helped spark renewed interest in poetry in schools and among general readers.

  • His approach has influenced many younger poets who aim for accessibility without sacrificing depth.

  • He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016.

  • Even late in life, Collins remains active in literary life, teaching, publishing, and reading new collections like Dog Show.

Famous Quotes by Billy Collins

Below are some memorable lines from Collins’s poems and interviews:

“I tell my students that I write for two people: myself and someone else. If it only reaches me, then I’ve failed; if it reaches someone else, then I’ve succeeded.”

“Poetry is life distilled.”

“Your willingness to look at your life through language with affection and curiosity—that’s going to open all kinds of doors.”

From his poem “Forgetfulness”:

“The name of the author I cannot remember,
his books, all dust, his face, all but vanished —”

From “Introduction to Poetry”:

“I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide”

From “The Art of Drowning”:

“In summer twilight, the clown’s face seems to glow
like a light bulb in an empty lot.”

These excerpts reflect Collins’s mix of clarity, metaphor, self-reflection, and emotional resonance.

Lessons from Billy Collins

  1. Speak openly, but leave room for mystery
    Collins often uses plain language, but allows the poem to open unto deeper meaning.

  2. Respect small moments
    He shows that ordinary life—from waiting rooms to airplane aisles—can become poetic if we attend to it.

  3. Humor and sincerity can coexist
    His voice is witty without trivializing emotion; playful without being superficial.

  4. Poetry isn’t only for poets
    Through initiatives like Poetry 180, he believed in bringing poems to ordinary readers, especially students.

  5. Evolution matters
    Even after decades of writing, Collins continues to publish, teach, and experiment—showing that a poet’s path is ongoing.

Conclusion

Billy Collins bridges the gap between poets and the public. His poems, readable and resonant, seduce us into paying attention: to our lives, our memories, our losses, and the quietly luminous details that too easily go unnoticed. His legacy is not merely in awards or titles, but in how many readers feel seen, amused, comforted, or surprised by a Collins line.

Articles by the author

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

Billy Collins

I'm trying to write poems that involve beginning at a known place, and ending up at a slightly different place. I'm trying to take a little journey from one place to another, and it's usually from a realistic place, to a place in the imagination.

Billy Collins

If an artist is driven primarily by social responsibility, I think the art probably suffers because, again, just as leadership has a rather defined end point or purpose, social responsibility would seem to have a very clear moral context.

Billy Collins

The life of Edward Estlin Cummings began with a childhood in Cambridge, Mass., that he described as happy, but he struggled in both his artistic and romantic exploits against the piousness of his father, an esteemed Harvard professor.

Billy Collins

I'm all for poetry catching up with technology, and just as there are iTunes, I think we should have iPoems. I mean, people should be able to walk around with their earbuds in and listening to poems on their iPod.

Billy Collins

The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.

Billy Collins

The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme.

Billy Collins

Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him to be slightly disoriented at the end, like I drove him outside of town at night and dropped him off in a cornfield.

Billy Collins