Forgetfulness

Despite Collins’s wide-reaching fame and fandom, many critics have taken issue with his poetic style over the years. The poet’s work is rooted in accessibility, colloquial language, and humor, but some feel that it recycles tropes or relies too heavily on cuteness and accessibility at the expense of art. R. D. Pohl, in an article for the Buffalo News, identifies some of the typical criticisms:

To his critics, however, Collins is a ‘major minor’ poet at best whose work is formulaic, if not predictable, and whose relentless efforts to charm the reader assume that the only way a poem can work is on the demotic level, which is to say, as colloquial speech. His criticism of the predilection toward ‘difficulty’ in contemporary poetry plays well on the reading circuit but reads like a repudiation of his modernist roots (Pohl, R.D. “Poetic Justice Billy Collins Still Stirs Controversy.” The Buffalo News, 17 Nov. 2006).

Critics like Ernest Hilbert offer a deeper look into Collins’s oeuvre, asserting that Collins sometimes relies too heavily on punch lines and clichés. He notes, however, that Collins’s poems read aloud exceptionally well, and this quality has helped Collins achieve his mass appeal (Hilbert, Ernest.