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What influenced Billy Collins' work, 'The Afterlife'?
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Billy Collins' "The Afterlife" is influenced by various religious traditions, including Christian, Hindu, and Greek, as well as contemporary secular ideas. His Catholic upbringing and life in New York also shape his work. Collins' poetic style is noted for its accessibility, influenced by contemporary poets like Karl Shapiro and the Beat Generation, which valued spontaneity and emotion. Additionally, he aspired to emulate Wallace Stevens, focusing on consciousness and emotional depth in poetry.
In “The Afterlife,” Billy Collins draws on a number of religious traditions to speculate on the possible correlation between philosophy and reality. His familiarity with Christian, Hindu, and Greek traditions, among others, emerges in this poem, which also draws on contemporary agnostic or secular humanist ideas about, or rejection of, an afterlife. The influence of Dante’s Inferno comes through in some passages.
Growing up as a New Yorker and returning to life in New York has been a major influence, as well as his Catholic upbringing. Collins developed an early reputation, which he has largely maintained, for writing unusually accessible poems. In addition to writing poetry, Collins has an academic background as a scholar of literature; for his doctoral studies, he specialized in the English Romantics. He taught literature and composition while writing poetry on the side and has held many faculty posts, including more than 30 years...
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at Lehman College, City University of New York.
Collins was Poet Laureate of the United States in 2001-2003. As a New Yorker, the September 11, 2001 attacks especially affected him. At the request of the U.S. Congress he wrote and delivered a commemorative poem, “The Names,” which he has continued to withhold from any commercial publication so as not to profit from it.
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Billy Collins has reported that he was influenced by the "contemporary" poets he was able to read in Poetry magazine growing up, people like Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov and Reed Whittemore. Along with them, he credits the movement and spirit of the cultural group the "Beats", or Beat Generation, from the late 1950's and early 1960's. This generation of people and writers valued spontaneity and open emotion, as well as a struggle against social conformity. They fought against organized religion and organized schooling, and are often referred to as the inspiration for the "hippies".
Besides those modern influences, Collins also reports that he wanted to be a newer Wallace Stevens, one of the first modernist poets. Stevens emphasized consciousness in his poetry, and wrote with little attention to conformed styles. Instead, he used obscure allusions and and attention to emotion.
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