The History Teacher

American poet Billy Collins’s poem “The History Teacher” was published in his 1991 collection Questions about Angels. This collection was the first to launch Collins to national prominence and this poem is among his most well-known.

As an example of a Postmodern poem, the poem is both free verse without a strict structure and self-reflexive, as the poem is aware of its own construction. In a commentary on contemporary conversations surrounding children, education, and rising violence, Collins uses the voice of a fictional history teacher to depict how efforts to sugarcoat historical suffering and cruelty result in the students themselves becoming cruel and violent.

Poet Biography

Billy Collins was born William James Collins on March 22, 1941 in Manhattan. His mother was a nurse before staying home to raise Collins and his father worked on Wall Street.

In 1963, Collins received a bachelor’s in English from the College of the Holy Cross. He then attended the University of California, Riverside, where he earned his M.A. and PhD in Romantic Poetry.

Collins joined the Lehman College English faculty in 1968, where he taught until 2016.

In 1975, Collins, alongside Walter Blanco and Steve Bailey, founded The Mid-Atlantic Review. He also published his first collection, Pokerface.

In 1977, Collins married Diane Olbright. They eventually divorced.

During the 1980s, Collins published two more collections, Video Poems in 1980 and The Apple that Astonished Paris: Poems in 1988. In 1986, he won a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

During the 1990s, Collins published three collections: Questions about Angels: Poems in 1991, The Art of Drowning in 1995, and Picnic, Lightning in 1998. It was this trifecta of collections that put him into the national literary spotlight. In 1993, he earned a Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Throughout this decade, Collins won five prizes from Poetry magazine. In 1994, he was named the magazine’s Poet of the Year.

Collins recorded a collection of 34 of his poems, titled The Best Cigarette, in 1997. The collection became a bestseller. When it was re-released in 2005, it was published under a Creative Commons license so that it could be used for free for non-commercial purposes.

Collins published prolifically during the 2000s. He published six collections: Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes (2000), Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001), Nine Horses: Poems (2002), The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems (2005), She Was Just Seventeen (2006), and Ballistics: Poems (2006).

Collins was first asked to read at the White House in 2001. He read again in 2011 and 2014.

Collins was named the US Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003. His major project as Poet Laureate was the program Poetry 180 for High Schools. This anthology included one poem for each day of the school year, resulting in 180 poems. A second refreshed anthology, More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, was later published. This program is available for free online.

Also, as US Poet Laureate, Collins was asked by the Librarian of Congress to write a poem to commemorate the victims of the 9/11 attacks. Reluctant to read it publicly, Collins did read this poem, “The Names,” at the September 6, 2002 US Congress special joint session. Not wanting to capitalize on the tragedy, Collins did not publish the poem in his own collections. The poem was included in the Library’s The Poets Laureate Anthology. This version included numerous typographical errors. In 2013, Collins did include “The Names” in his collection Aimless love.

Collins appeared on Garrison Keillor’s NPR radio show A Prairie Home Companion multiple times, where Collins’s work was exposed to a wider audience. In 2002, Collins recorded two poems for Keillor’s collection Good Poems. During the summer of 2013, Collins guest hosted Garrison Keillor’s popular daily radio broadcast The Writer's Almanac on NPR.

Collins served as the New York Poet Laureate from 2004 and 2006.

In 2005, Collins recorded Billy Collins Live: A Performance. During this year, Collins was awarded the first Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Poetry.

During the 2010s, Collins continued to publish. These five collections include Horoscopes for the Dead: Poems (2011), Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems (2013), Voyage (2014), The Rain in Portugal: Poems (2016), and Whale Day: and Other Poems (2020).

Collins became the Poetry Consultant for Smithsonian Magazine in 2012. During this year, Collins presented a TED talk called “Everyday moments, caught in time.” Immensely successful and voted as one of the favorite 100 TED speakers of all time, Collins was invited to give a second TED Talk in 2014. In addition, Collins appeared as himself in an episode of the PBS animated children’s series Martha Speaks.

In 2013, Collins toured with singer-songwriter Aimee Mann. They toured together again in 2015.

Collins served as a US State Department cultural emissary to Russia, where he traveled in 2014.

In 2016, Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Collins married attorney Suzannah Gilman in 2019.

During the COVID-19 pandemic stay-at-home orders beginning in March 2020, Collins appeared daily on Facebook Live to share his poetry.

As of August 2022, Collins is on the editorial board at The Alaska Quarterly Review and the advisory board at the Southern Review.

Poem Text

Collins, Billy. “The History Teacher.” 1991. The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.

Summary

The poem’s speaker describes a history teacher who is “[t]rying to protect his students’ innocence” (Line 1). To do so, he revises historical information to present a sugarcoated version of the past. In the first and second stanzas, he makes the past milder, calling the Ice Age the “Chilly Age” (Line 3) and the Stone Age the “Gravel Age” (Line 5). The teacher reimagines the Spanish Inquisition as a period where people asked a lot of trivial questions. The War of Roses was about gardens and Enola Gay only dropped an atom. Despite the teacher’s historical revisions, the students leave the classroom and go to the playground, where they bully and beat up other children. Unaware of the outside events, the teacher walks home while wondering how he can reimagine other historical events like the Boer War to protect his students.