Billy Collins was inspired by Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti in his youth. Beat poetry was a movement that responded to post-World War II Modernism. The movement started in the 1940s and lasted through the 1950s. Beat poets questioned mainstream politics and culture and sought to change consciousness and break from conventional writing expectations. This early poetic inspiration can be seen in Collins’s canon, as he often questions conventional ways of thinking.

The Beat movement anticipates many elements of Postmodernism, with which Collins can more closely be identified.

The term Postmodern is broader than other literary movements, largely because it is a term used to describe a large portion of contemporary poetry written after and reacting to the Modernist movement that lasted until the late 1950s.

As a result of this broad categorization, Collins’s poetry both reflects these qualities and does not. Collins’s use of free verse and general rejection of poetic forms align with a key feature of Postmodernism, though he does not push it as far as other poets who deconstruct form more thoroughly. Many Postmodern poems are self-reflexive. A self-reflexive poem is aware of its construction and artificiality and considers the impact.