KUDOS
A GIFT THAT’S CLASSICALLY COLLINS
Menelaus
Paris
Diomedes
O
rdinarily, Billy Collins can, in a single sitting, write a poem of the sort that has made him a national treasure. I try not to hate him for that. It helps to know that the native New Yorker, a former two-term U.S. poet laureate whose books are perennial bestsellers, spent decades refining the rare ability to “put the fun back in profundity,” as one reviewer phrased it, while addressing the simple mysteries of everyday life — from trying to fathom what dogs think of their owners to wondering why a teenager steeped in the raw energy of adolescence can’t muster enough of it to clean up her room. Collins, a regular contributor to this publication who retired to Winter Park several years ago, just turned 80 and published his 13th collection, Whale Day: And Other Poems. But he has arrived at a stage in his career when his attention is divided between his next volume of verse and the larger legacy he’ll leave behind. He placed his notes, diaries and other historical papers at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, where they’ll be in good company among the archives of such fellow literary luminaries as T.S. Elliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, e.e.
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Odysseus
Nestor
Achilles
cummings, Anne Sexton and Dylan Thomas. Then, more recently, he donated $250,000 to create an endowed scholarship for promising college students, though the gift didn’t go to an institution with a noted creative writing program, as you might expect. Instead, he bequeathed it to his alma mater, the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, to support a somewhat more obscure program: classics, a subject that traditionally involves the study of ancient cultures, particularly that of the Greeks and Romans. A good deal of personal sentiment is involved here. But there’s a bit more to the story than that — and not just for poets and professors. When Collins graduated from Holy Cross in 1963 with a degree in English, all his classmates had been male (it would be nine years before women were admitted) and the faculty consisted entirely of Jesuits, the highly educated, hard-core order of priests who were essentially the Roman Catholic equivalent of the Marines. Their charges wore coats and ties to classes and the cafeteria, were rousted out of bed at 5 a.m. for misbehaving — and studied Latin and Greek,
Agamemnon
both the languages and the classical cultures and philosophies in which they evolved. Collins learned to love poetry from his mother, who read it to him as a child; absorbed conviviality from his father, an Irish-Catholic insurance executive who could walk into a tavern and turn strangers into back-slapping friends; and discovered the danger of indulging in too much self-importance from his classmates. “If you took yourself too seriously in grade school, you got beat up,” he recalls. “If you took yourself too seriously in high school, you got ridiculed.” But press him for the bedrock of his success as an English professor for 35 years and a poet with a worldwide fan base, and he’ll tell you it was what he learned at Holy Cross about both the humanistic philosophies and rhythms of language invented by the ancients. An interviewer once described Collins as “the class clown in the schoolhouse of American poets.” Fair enough. But he was a clown with an education in the classics, and that made all the difference — as it likely did for scores of his fellow graduates, whatever their professions. Though he didn’t plan it this way, Collins’ ges-
