Understanding poetry
In Billy Collins poem, “Introduction to Poetry”, he perfectly explains many of my as well as other student’s previous experiences with poetry, in which “all [we] want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it” (Collins). Many times, the meaning or underlying message of a poem is very difficult to identify which leads us to force a meaning out of the poem. For example, last week, I had to read Vera Pavlova’s poem, “To converse with the greats” for my english class and could not understand what message the poet was trying to communicate to the readers despite reading it over and over. However, now that I think about it, Pavlova’s poem is very similar to Collins’ “Introduction to Poetry”. In Pavlova’s poem, she explains how you must put yourself in the shoes of the greats and think from their perspective to converse with them and truly understand their literary works, and in Collins’ poem, he explains how you must “walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch.” (Collins) In order to understand poetry, you need to understand the poet’s perspective and what they were going through as they were writing their poems.
