Introduction to Poetry

The formal title of Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry” stands in stark contrast to the otherwise playful lines found within the body of the poem itself. Resembling a beginner level course of study, the poem’s title asserts that readers are about to learn the fundamentals of poetry in a very rigid and academic way. However, the tone of the poem is unexpectedly light. The speaker does not lecture students; instead, the speaker creates a more colloquial discourse, asking them to bring imagination and creativity into the classroom (Line 1). The beginning of “Introduction to Poetry” is not as strict or stuffy as readers anticipate from the title, and through this juxtaposition, Collins begins to deconstruct the rigidity of traditional poetic pedagogy by encouraging students to play with language in the same way that he does (see: Themes “Methods of Teaching”).

Collins utilizes detailed figurative language to establish the speaker’s fun and fluid method of teaching. Stanza 1 begins with a simile: A figure of speech that compares two dissimilar things, commonly signaled by the words “like” or “as” in a line of poetry.