I started moving away from poets like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane and started reading poets like, again, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, Philip Larkin, and the British poets who were imported through that important anthology put together by Alvarez - and those would include Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. And I think these poets gave me assurance that there were other ways to write besides the rather involuted style of high modernism whose high priests were Pound, Eliot and Stevens, and Crane perhaps.
The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're igno… - Billy Collins
The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're igno…
- Billy Collins
It's time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a seat of unremarkab… - Billy Collins
It's time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a seat of unremarkab…
But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the p… - Billy Collins
But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the p…
In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice. - Billy Collins
In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
Write the poem only you can write. - Billy Collins
Write the poem only you can write.
I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and righ… - Billy Collins
I think my work has to do with a sense that we are attempting, all the time, to create a logical, rational path through the day. To the left and righ…
The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper. - Billy Collins
The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper.
While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane. - Billy Collins
While the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly in the windowpane.
A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried. - Billy Collins
A motto I've adopted is, if at first you don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.
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