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 1 Share Now -
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 2 Share Now -
We love, you know, children love the ingredients of poetry. And then they go into this tunnel that we call adolescence, and when they come out of it, they hate poetry. - Billy Collins 3 Share Now -
I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes. - Billy Collins 4 Share Now -
Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure. - Billy Collins 5 Share Now -
Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction. - Billy Collins 6 Share Now -
In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings. - Billy Collins 7 Share Now -
For most Americans, poetry plays no role in their everyday lives. But also for most Americans, contemporary painting or jazz or sculpture play no role either. I'm not saying poetry is singled out as a special thing to ignore. - Billy Collins 8 Share Now -
I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult. - Billy Collins 9 Share Now -
Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be part of poetry's expressiveness. - Billy Collins 10 Share Now -
