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.....
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