Research Paper On Billy Collins

Billy Collins
William James “Billy” Collins was born in March 22, 1941 in New York City to William and Katherine Collins. Katherine Collins was a nurse who sparked Billy’s interest in words and poetry. His mother was able to recite on most subjects. In 1963, he received his B.A. in English from the College of the Holy Cross and his Masters’ and his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Riverside. Collins joined the faculty of Lehman College in 1968 and has been teaching for over thirty years. He is a founding advisory member of the CUNY Institute for Irish-American Studies. He has also taught as a visiting writer at Sarah Lawrence College, as well as teaching workshops in the United States and Ireland.
In 1997, Collins recorded
He had a six-figure sum for a three-book deal. In the poetry world that kind of offer is unheard of. With the help of his literary agent, Chris Calhoun of Sterling Lord Literistic and editor Daniel Menaker, Billy Collins remained at the top of the literary world for quite a while. Collins has several prizes in recognition of his published poems. In 1994, Collins won “Poet of the Year,” and in 2005, Collins was the first recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Poetry. Bruce Weber from the New York Times dubbed Billy Collins “the most popular poet in America.” Collins’s familiar, humorous poems welcome the readers, but often slip into an individual, affectionate or philosophical look into everyday reading and
Collins displays this by his use of imagery, specific youthful diction and other literary devices to further illuminate the solemn message that as we age and reality begins to set in there is a loss of imagination. In the first stanza Collins uses specific diction to compare aging to contracting an illness. For example, he states that the feeling of aging is “a kind of measles of the spirit”(Collins 5). In the second stanza the child reminisces on their younger years and the characters they imagined themselves to be. At the age of four the child was a wizard with the capability of turning invisible if they drank their milk in a certain way. By the age seven the child was a solider and nine a prince. The child being a wizard at the age of four and being capable of achieving invisibility is significant because it illuminates the vivid imagination of young children. Then the child imagines themselves as a solider and then a prince. Which is significant because the character being to rank higher. This emphasizes the responsibilities and loss of imagination as the characters lack capabilities such as turning