Language In Billy Collins 'Introduction To Poetry'
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In Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry”, Collins expresses the fact that instead of enjoying the beauty of a poem, some people only want to find out the meaning. The teacher, who is also the narrator, starts the poem with a simile where he/she wants the students “to take a poem / and hold it up to the light / like a color slide” (Collins 1-3). The simile makes the reader compare a poem to a color slide, something that is difficult to see clearly unless examined closely. The word “I” is used here to describe what the teacher wants the student to do, and is repeated many times throughout the poem. The second to fourth stanza contains the lines: “or press an ear against its hive / and watch him probe his way out, / and feel the walls for