A Quote by Billy Collins

I was influenced by the Beats because I actually just began to commit adolescence around 1955, when "Howl" and Rebel Without a Cause and a lot of other new things were popping up. (Again I'm trying to give you a finite version of this career.) And then I came under the sway of Wallace Stevens when I was in college and graduate school, and basically set as a life goal the ambition of writing third-rate Wallace Stevens. I thought I would be completely content if I was recognized at some later point in my life as a third-rate Wallace Stevens.

Billy Collins

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Quote Author

Billy Collins
American - Poet
Born: March 22, 1941

Wallace Stevens had more time to write as an insurance agent. He was a bond lawyer and I know that insurance company lawyers don't have to do nearly as much as we had to do. We were out more in the production area. I'm not condemning Stevens for having had a better job than I did, but that's one of the many places where I differ from him.

Ted Kooser

I turn now not to the Bible but to Wallace Stevens.

R. S. Thomas

I think one percent of the population attended college when Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein were at Harvard. Now I think forty percent of Americans have some college education. That's an astronomical change.

Robert Hass

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.

Billy Collins

Wallace Stevens: the Platonist celebrates endless change, but with regret.

Mason Cooley

I am completing a book I began back in 2002 called 'Poems in the Manner of.' 'The Matador of Metaphor' is from this manuscript. It is an homage to Wallace Stevens that appropriates certain of his techniques.

David Lehman

I write to get myself writing. That and read Wallace Stevens' "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" for the umpteenth time. Certain authors for me, certain books, just by reading a phrase I feel I can write.

Dan Chiasson

Everyone enjoys stories of double lives and secret identities. Children have Superman; intellectuals have Wallace Stevens.

Dana Gioia

Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of not knowing what I was talking about. I was going for a kind of clever verbal effect. I was trying to sound linguistically or verbally interesting. I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn't know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life.

Billy Collins

A Cat Stevens record isn't just Cat Stevens' ideas. It's Cat Stevens and all the musicians who play with Cat Stevens, right?

John Darnielle

I like what Wallace Stevens said: "Poetry must almost successfully resist intelligence." I just change the word "poetry" to "my photographs".

Keith Carter

When I first heard Wallace Stevens voice, it was by chance: a friend wanted to listen to the recording he had made for the Harvard Vocarium Series.

Helen Vendler

When I first heard Wallace Stevens' voice, it was by chance: a friend wanted to listen to the recording he had made for the Harvard Vocarium Series.

Helen Vendler

I'm not an historian but I'll venture an opinion: Modern cosmology really began with Darwin and Wallace. Unlike anyone before them, they provided explanations of our existence that completely rejected supernatural agents... Darwin and Wallace set a standard not only for the life sciences but for cosmology as well.

Leonard Susskind

I admire the poetic relationship to place as enacted in Wallace Stevens' poems; his poetics strikes me as an argument against the restraints of realism.