The Afterlife Essay

Billy Collins
This Study Guide consists of approximately 25 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Afterlife.
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The Afterlife Essay

Billy Collins
This Study Guide consists of approximately 25 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Afterlife.
This section contains 1,233 words
(approx. 4 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Afterlife Study Guide

Semansky is an instructor of literature whose writing appears regularly in literary journals. In this essay, Semansky considers ideas of belief and imagination in Collins' poem.

A writer once said that nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who claimed that "God is dead," was a great religious thinker not because he pondered the metaphysics of Christian theology - he did not - but because in his scalding critiques of Christianity he addressed genuine religious questions such as "How should human beings live?" Collins, in his serio-comic book of poems, Questions about Angels, also addresses weighty religious questions without being religious. In poem after poem, he considers the ways in which religious imagery has become entangled with human thought and desire and ferrets out the meaning of such entanglements. In "The Afterlife," for example, Collins draws on the ways in which life after death has been represented in a...

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This section contains 1,233 words
(approx. 4 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Afterlife Study Guide
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The Afterlife from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.