choices, Collins illustrates the extreme of such thinking. His fantasy of an afterlife that pleases everyone exemplifies a kind of response that many might consider “politically correct,” in that no one is wrong and everyone’s belief is not only honored but validated.

However, this is a fantasy, and Collins makes sure readers know that. By showing that Lazarus’s secret about the truth of the afterlife corresponds to the “alcove in your head,” Collins highlights the link between the imagination and belief. Specifically, he demonstrates how the latter is a consequence of the former. Thinking itself is abstract, as is belief, and neither could exist without the capacity of the mind to form images, to give shape to the tumult of desire that propels human beings forward on a daily basis. The images Collins chooses satisfy as they entertain, titillate, and offend. They are at once hilarious and blasphemous.

Because the poem is about the afterlife, death plays a key role. Throughout the poem, the dead talk, they sing, they eat, but they never seem truly dead. Even when they “lie on their backs in their coffins,” they still desire. Collins’s genius is in domesticating the idea of death, making it palatable through his cartoonish depictions of the afterlife. The dead are not really dead but part of the continuum of life. He illustrates this idea in other poems in the collection as well, including “The Dead,” the poem immediately following “The Afterlife.” In the former poem, the dead watch over the living “Through the glass-bottom boats of / heaven as they row themselves slowly through eternity.”

Collins’s representations of the afterlife draw on images taken from popular culture, as much as they do hallowed religious texts and, as such, they illustrate the supremacy of the imagination, what poet Wallace Stevens called “the power of the mind over the possibility of things.” Rather than affirm the continuation of individual identity after death, Collins’s images play with the idea, manipulating readers’ desire for such possibility while simultaneously caricaturing it. In the popular poem, “Sunday Morning,” which spells out the significance of the imagination for modern society, Stevens writes, “Death is the mother of beauty.” By this, Stevens means that the inevitability of death gives value and beauty to life, and that human beings should find meaning in the sensuous experience of earthly things rather than waiting for a reward in the afterlife. Collins echoes this sentiment in the last stanza of his poem by describing the death of those who died believing in nothing.

The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins wishing they could return so they could learn Italian or see the pyramids, or play some golf in a light rain. They wish they could wake in the morning like you and stand at a window examining the winter trees, every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.

The moral of the poem, then, is that the living should appreciate life, taking advantage of the opportunities they have and not spend it imagining what might come after death. Ingeniously, Collins bookends the various descriptions of the afterlife with the image of a person ending his day and beginning a new one, thus giving shape to both the journeys of the dead and the living. In addressing the reader, the speaker is also addressing himself. The “winter trees” and “the ghost writing of snow” evoke death’s presence in life, its reminder both to be aware of the possibilities of the present and to honor the past.

Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on “The Afterlife,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003. Semansky is an instructor of literature whose writing appears regularly in literary journals.

Billy Collins threatens to become the first genuinely popular American poet since Robert Frost and Rod McKuen. Unlike Frost, though, Collins suffers from a decades-long decline in publications that print poetry. Long past are the days when newspapers would regularly print verse and during which educated Americans were exposed to poetry in a variety of general magazines. But, unlike McKuen, whose works gained a great deal of popularity in the late 1960s, Collins is able to be accessible without being maudlin and banal. Collins’s success, though, has bred its own species of critic such as Jeredith Merrin, who lambastes Collins’s user-friendliness and lack of emotional depth. Writing in The Southern Review, Merrin asserts that Collins “is a writer who takes you for a walk on the mild side.” On the other hand, Collins has retained an audience of perceptive and appreciative readers. Writing in the prestigious journal Poetry, the reviewer John Taylor has said, “Ultimately, a funny-sad ambience characterizes his best work. His soft metaphysical touch seemingly derives from an acute awareness of man’s irreparable separation from both material reality and any conceivable spiritual horizon.” Collins is both accessible and accomplished; if he does not in the end plumb the depths of consciousness and the mystery of existence, he does write in an admirably engaging and entertaining style. “The Afterlife” is a poem with many postmodern sensibilities: allusive, ironic, self-reflexive, and humorous, it clearly illustrates the assets and liabilities of the poet’s style.

Like many contemporary poets, Collins writes in free but not unstructured verse. His lines tend to contain five important stressed syllables, with a number of unstressed syllables falling in a natural, unmetered pattern. This rhythmic pattern is most likely a result of the poet’s sense of line and rhythm rather than any conscious decision. It resembles Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “sprung rhythm,” which counts only the important syllables, but it is considerably looser. Merrin calls it “approximate pentameter.” Occasionally, Collins will dispense with the five-beat line when it suits his purpose, as in the line “and this is the secret that silent Lazarus would not reveal.” In his line and stanza structure, Collins implicitly respects form but clearly does not regard it as something to distract from the other aspects of his poetry, such as humor, surprise, and allusion. Indeed, it takes some work to see that Collins uses any rhythmic structure at all. The beat of the poem, such as it is, does its work upon the reader subliminally, beneath the conscious appreciation for meter that one sees in the poems of Robert Frost or other formalists.

One of the keys to understanding this poem is to recognize how the poet combines the mundane with the mysterious. Death is perhaps the most puzzling and inscrutable mystery that faces humans. It is the grounds of anxiety, the stuff of tragedy, and the source of sadness, poignancy, and passion. Most Americans, when polled, will say they believe in an afterlife, and doubtless many of those who cannot bring themselves to such a belief have meditated on what survives of an individual after one has, in Shakespeare’s words, “shuffled off this mortal coil.” Essentially, there are two approaches to death, the tragic and the comic. Collins is a funny guy, and this poem is characterized by a bemused lightness of expression and a tolerant comic vision.

The opening lines of the poem juxtapose images of utter normality with a mysterious otherworldliness. The afterlife is seen as a nocturnal shadow-existence; the dead “of the day” start their journey each night, traveling away from the world of life and tooth-brushing and magazines. Collins does not have a single message to preach about the afterlife. A true relativist and postmodernist, Collins’s single central insight, the secret that even Lazarus, the man raised from the dead by Christ, will not reveal, is that there is no one destination, that “everyone is right, as it turns out.” If Paradise or Hell awaited everyone, regardless of their beliefs, then this would not be the light and humorous poem that Collins intends. Such a poem would challenge and frighten and imply moralistic judgment. The poet wants none of this; he couches his own poignancy over death in images that humorously reflect a variety of religious beliefs. Collins never quite states his own view on the afterlife, though he hints at it, at the end.

The first images of the afterlife are recognizable from contemporary religious traditions and popular culture. Some of the dead go into a white zone, a zone that hints at transcendence and a passage into another realm, but which remains reverently agnostic in being free of any details. Subsequent images depict the judgment of God in an almost cartoonish way, “with a golden ladder on one side, a coal chute on the other.” The conventional image of the celestial choir is invoked here as well. For the shallow and hedonistic, the afterlife is just as they too would want it. The “less inventive” find themselves surrounded by the sensory pleasures of “food and chorus girls.”

But none of this is funny, and Collins has set out to amuse his readers. A typical Collins poem often revels in humor and wit and irony on its way to some insight that is more substantial. After the conventional views of the afterlife, the poet regales readers with other images and ideas. Some of the dead approach the apartment of a female God who observes them through a hole in her door. This God is fully anthropomorphized as a middle-aged woman with “short wiry hair.” Further, she has “glasses hung from her neck by a string.” Nothing could be farther from the God of Infinite Justice and Retribution. “Quite so,” one can imagine Collins saying. Many people want to be infinitely far from such a God.

Some people believe in reincarnation, and Collins represents this idea by speaking of people who are gearing up for a new life, “squeezing” into new bodies. Readers read about one soul “trying on / the skin of a monkey like a tight suit / ready to begin another life in a more simple key.” Some are simply floating off into a sphere of “benign vagueness,” reflecting the view that the afterlife has nothing specific to be said about it, that it is merely, as Collins says, “the ultimate elsewhere.” It is all a matter of choice and individual belief, Collins seems to be saying at this point. Whatever one believes, that is what the afterlife is. Such a view is common among postmodern relativists. Such readers, and there are many of them, would find Collins’s poem to be enlightened and nonjudgmental. Nevertheless, some of the dead seem to be sillier than the others. A few classicists descend into a pagan underworld, guarded by Cerberus and, in a touch of mocking humor, Edith Hamilton, the compiler of one of the standard works of classical mythology, which is still taught in high schools and colleges.

In their instructive book The Postmodern Turn, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner distinguish between modernist and postmodernist writers by saying, “Where modern artists were typically insular, obscure, and idiosyncratic in their work, postmodern artists began to speak in the most available, public, and commodified languages.” One of the keys to Collins’s accessibility is that he does not, like the high modernists Pound and Eliot, allude to obscure texts and sources, challenging the erudition of the reader and requiring footnotes for most students to follow. Instead, Collins generally limits his allusions to writers one can expect to encounter in good high school classes and undergraduate literature courses. As one might imagine, such a middlebrow approach alienates the erudite but gains a following among the general poetry audience. Collins’s poems reach out, not just to the readers of small and specialized journals, but to a public that wants some thoughtfulness but not bombast and pretentiousness. Jason Gray, in a sympathetic review in Prairie Schooner, calls the work the “poetry of the moment’s reflection, the sigh, the wish, the little hopes of life.” Fully congruent with postmodernism’s distrust for “meta-narrative,” Collins turns his attention away from grandiose gestures and systems and toward the lived moments and reflective incidents of a playful but rather quiet life.

At the end of the poem Collins seems to reveal his own views of the afterlife and in which the humor turns poignant. Readers may infer that Collins himself does not believe in the sorts of afterlife he has depicted in his poem. He puts his own attitudes into the perspective of the great class of none-of-the-above. “The rest just lie on their backs in their coffins”; because these people have no particular views of the afterlife, they have no place to go. Earth is where they direct their thoughts. Or, in Merrin’s acerbic estimation, “What you already know on earth, he assures you, is all you need to know.” Since the dead have their own simple desires, they think about rather simple and modest activities such as learning Italian, visiting the pyramids, or playing golf. All these activities seem rather whimsical compared to grandiose concepts of the afterlife. But they are all things that humans do, some, at least, and that most are capable of doing. In this last stanza, Collins exhibits a mild regret that life is too short and there are many worthwhile things that will never be accomplished.

At the end, Collins says, “They could wake in the morning like you.” This “you” is simultaneously a direct address to the reader, and it is the poet speaking to himself about his own mortality and his own limited sovereignty in the kingdom of the living.

The dead, as Collins represents, wish they could stand examining the winter trees, with “every branch traced with the ghost writing of snow.” Aside from the quiet evocativeness of the word “ghost,” this ending alludes to the famous conclusion of James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead”: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” For Collins, contemplation of the afterlife is really a call to reflect on life and the living. If one has no hope of eternal reward and no fear of damnation, regret and whimsical musing are fitting and proper attitudes. Collins, in his own quiet, unpretentious, and somewhat postmodern way, brings his poem to conclusion in a meditative moment that transcends irony.

Source: Frank Pool, Critical Essay on “The Afterlife,” in Poetry for Students, Gale, 2003. Pool is a published poet and teacher of advanced placement and international baccalaureate senior English.

Billy Collins’s poetry has received a great deal of critical acclaim and several prestigious awards. From his first mature work in The Apple That Astonished Paris to his later Sailing Alone around the Room: New and Selected Poems, he has adopted a voice that is both philosophical and comic, intellectually stimulating yet accessible. In fact, Collins’s attraction to performance poetry (his CD audio book The Best Cigarette sold well) and his reasonably large popular appeal might seem antithetical to the critical acclaim he has received. To put it another way, the accessibility of Collins’s work and the emphasis by the poet and his publishers on his stature as a mainstream poet are quite unexpected in the work of one who is also so celebrated by academic critics.

Whatever the case may be, Collins’s work is connected to the recent literary past and should be considered within the same context as the meditative lyrical practices of poets ranging from Wordsworth to Auden to the contemporaries Stephen Dunn and Linda Pastan. Frequently beginning with a subjective encounter with the external world, Collins’s poems then embark upon ruminations that may allude to literary figures (Dickinson, Wordsworth, Yeats, and others) or to philosophy and religion. Collins has found a great deal of success with this mode, and perhaps the only criticism that should be levied against his work is that it seems from Questions about Angels to Picnic, Lightning that there has been little exploration in form or in terms of themes and subjects. Considering a few of the titles in Questions about Angels illustrates Collins’s meditative lyrical practice. “Reading Myself to Sleep,” “The Norton Anthology of Literature,” “Going Out for Cigarettes,” and “Weighing the Dog” are all poems that begin with a mundane experience and then move outward to a consideration of something meditatively engaging or philosophically puzzling.

Another aspect of Collins’s work that separates him from a great many contemporary poets is the fact that he is also unabashed about using satire and humor, and his meditative lyrics utilize a range of tones, from the absurd to highly serious. Consider, for instance, these lines from “Marginalia” in Picnic, Lightning. The speaker asks all those who “have managed to graduate from college / without ever having written ‘Man vs. Nature’” in a margin to step forward, comically undercutting the pedantic aspects of teaching literature. In another poem, however, Collins writes:

And the soul is up on the roof
in her nightdress, straddling the ridge,
singing a song about the wildness of the sea
until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.
Then, they all will return to the sleeping body
the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree.

This poem has a tone that is much closer to the lyrical mode of a poet like Wallace Stevens, and, coupled with the comic riffs Collins uses elsewhere, it is illustrative of his tonal range. The voice in these poems is always intimate, however, in a way that Stevens’s work would never attempt to be. Perhaps this intimacy, as well as the frequent use of humor, is connected to Collins’s emphasis on the performance dimensions of poetry and on his use of CDs and public readings to promote his work.

Collins makes frequent references to jazz and to musicians. This is another aspect of his interest in the performance possibilities of poetry and in the guise of improvisation his poems seem to aspire toward. The effects can be engaging if not always completely compelling as powerful poetry. Consider these lines from “I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Verson of ‘Three Blind Mice’”:

And I start wondering how they came to be blind.
If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister,
and I think of the poor mother
brooding over her sightless young triplets.

Or was it a common accident, all three caught
in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?
If not,
If each came to his or her blindness separately,

how did they ever manage to find one another?
Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse
to locate even one fellow mouse with vision
let alone two other blind ones?

There is doubt that this is clever, and it is popular. But many poets have attracted reasonably wide readership only to suffer anonymity in fifty years—or less. Whether Collins’s work will avoid such a fate is still a question, one perhaps connected to whether or not he is willing to depart from his previously praised modes and develop his abilities in different directions.

Source: Tod Marshall, “Collins, Billy,” in Contemporary Poets, 7th ed., edited by Thomas Riggs, St. James Press, 2001, pp. 186–87.