Poetry can be very hard to understand if you can’t fully grasp its meaning. In Billy Collins’ poem “Introduction to Poetry”, he is trying to get his class to realize that poetry is more than words. It’s also full of ideas and meaning.
Imagery is the main literary device used in this poem. The poet writes “I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide”. This simply means the poet wants his class to imagine poetry as something colorful and full of life, instead of seeing it as something dull. Poems that have imagery give the reader great detail about specific events in the poem.
Poetry has always been my favorite form of English. Poetry can be very deep and beautiful if you are really in tune with what the poet writes. I personally like when poems have imagery and sounds in them because I can imagine what the details in the poem look like and I can hear what sounds the poet is describing in their poem.
Another part of the poem that interests me is when the poet writes “But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it”. Whenever something is not easy to understand, many people close their minds and want the answer right away. They don’t want to think outside the box and see the full picture. It’s almost instant gratification to them if they figure out the answer as quick as possible. This problem is found a lot in many college students.
I personally enjoyed this poem because I can relate to it. In my high school English class, we read a poem once every week so my brain is automatically trained to think about what a poet was saying in their writing. Reading this poem gave me a flashback to my high school English teacher when he was trying to get the class to understand a poem, just as Billy Collins’ was trying to get his class to understand a poem.
In conclusion, the imagery in the poem adds great understanding of the poem because a person is more likely to read something...