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Michael McLeod
Here's a rough draft of a column I just wrote about Billy Collins. Since it touches on a Catholic education I thought I might post it here. If it reminds you of bad experiences in Latin class I apologize.
Don't know if you've discovered Billy's poetry but he's really clever in a Garrison Keillor sort of way. It's been a thrill getting to know him and we do bond a bit over the Catholic education thing.
I carped about it then and probably got c's in latin class but it has surely helped me as a writer in the long run.
Sorry my mom isn't around. She would dearly love this.
As a rule, Billy Collins, a native New Yorker and former two-term U.S. poet laureate who lives in Winter Park (and regularly contributes to this publication) can write a verse of the sort that has made him the most popular American poet of his generation in one sitting.
I try not to hate him for that.
It helps to know that it took decades for him to refine the urbane yet down-to-earth musings that “put the fun back in profundity,” as one reviewer phrased it, while addressing the simple mysteries of everyday life – from trying to fathom what a dog might really think of its master to wondering why a teenager steeped in the raw energy of adolescence can’t find the energy to clean up her room.
Collins, having just turned 80 and published his 13th book of verse, has arrived at the stage of a writer’s career when his attention turns to the legacy he’ll leave behind.
He placed his notes, diaries and other historical papers to the University of Texas, where they’ll be in good company alongside archival material from other significant poets such as Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, T.S. Elliot, Anne Sexton and Dylan Thomas.
More recently, Collins donated $250,000 to create an endowed scholarship for promising college students. But the gift didn’t go to an institution with a noted creative writing program, as you might expect. Instead, it was given to his alma mater -- the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts -- specifically to support a considerably less glamorous program: classics.
The Billy Collins ’63 Scholarship for Studies in Classics includes the initial gift as well as a match through the college’s Hope + Access Campaign for Financial Aid, bringing the total to $500,000.
Each year, two recipients who have demonstrated both a financial need and a commitment to major in the discipline will receive the scholarships, which will be awarded in perpetuity.
“I’m pleased to create this endowment at Holy Cross because its classics program is the most spirited and highly regarded of any such program at a liberal arts college in the United States,” said Collins in a press release.
He added: “My years of studying classics there provided me with a solid underpinning to my career as a teacher and as a poet. When I’m composing poems, the classical languages are among the candles that light up my page.”
Though a certain amount of sentiment is involved here, there’s quite a bit more to it than that. Collins graduated from Holy Cross in 1963 with a degree in English. The students were all male (until 1972) and the faculty consisted of Jesuits – the highly-educated, hard-core order of priests who are essentially the Roman Catholic equivalent of the Marines.
Their charges at the college 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 -- both the languages themselves 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. He learned conviviality from his father, an Irish-Catholic insurance executive who could walk into a tavern and turn strangers into back-slapping friends.
And he learned not to take himself seriously from his classmates: “If you took yourself too seriously in grade school, you got beat up. If you took yourself too seriously in high school, you were 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 the humanistic philosophies and rhythms of language invented by the ancients, passed down through the generations.
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.
Though Collins didn’t plan it this way, his gesture of support for the discipline arrives at a time when classics departments across the country find themselves caught up in the political and cultural clashes of the day.
One reason is that white supremacy groups have seized on classical iconography and a twisted interpretation of Greek and Roman cultures to support racist ideology. This has led some scholars to reexamine their responsibility to research and convey the realities of Greco-Roman attitudes about race.
A key figure in the debate is Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a Princeton University classics professor who has dedicated much of his career to researching slavery as it existed in Greece and Rome.
Peralta has even suggested that, given the historic misappropriation of Greco-Roman ideals from the Nazis to present-day extremists, classics departments should be disbanded, rebuilt from scratch and focused exclusively on combatting such views.
Not surprisingly, that notion has churned up the still, staid waters of academe. The issue is especially puzzling to Collins, who sees the matter through two lenses.
As an educator who taught classes in English literature for 35 years, “I just never considered the classics to be in need of defending,” he says. “They’re so foundational to our common understanding at all levels. You might as well bring math and physics into question.”
As a wordsmith, Collins is keenly aware that Latin-derived words make up roughly 50 percent of the English language. The percentage is much higher in certain categories. Words that represent abstractions are largely Latin-based, while words with Anglo-Saxon roots tend to describe concrete, specific things.
“It’s like two verbal pigots,” says Collins. “A good poet knows when to turn which faucet on and off.”
Obviously reassessing traditions so deeply imbedded in both our culture and our languages is a delicate task. But it’s one that’s already being taken on by some classics experts.
One of them is Rebecca Futo Kennedy, associate professor of classics in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, who incorporates discussion of race and ethnicity in her classes.
“The responsibility rests with all of us to look at how and what we teach -- especially when it contributes to the continued use of the classical past to support modern white supremacy,” she says.
Kennedy is careful to emphasize the long-standing tradition of the Romans to allow anyone – both the descendants of freed slaves and people of other ethnic groups in the provinces – to earn citizenship as a Roman.
She says that this fact doesn’t mean Romans didn’t have prejudices.
What it does mean is that Romans must have had a fundamental understanding of diversity as an alloy that strengthens a culture. Mark that down as yet another lesson the ancients passed down to us.
And by the way: You probably know what an alloy is. It’s when you blend two metals together to create another metal with more strength and durability.
But you might not know its derivation. Neither did I until I just now looked it up. It’s from Old French, alijer, which means “to join” – and the Latin, alligare, which means “to bind.”
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