Commentaire du texte "Introduction to Poetry" en anglais

In this poem, Billy Collins, writer and professor, describes the act of teaching poetry. He lists all the many ways he would like his students to look at poetry. In the end, he expresses his frustration with their limited and narrow desire to find meaning in poetry rather than feeling and finding pleasure in reading some.

There are 4 different main themes present in this, the first one is education and teaching of poetry, theme that Billy Collins knows well.

Indeed, the title directly refers to this idea. “Introduction to poetry” has an interesting double meaning. The word “introduction” is linked with the idea of a university course on getting the basics about poetry but is also meaning that the person speaking introduces Poetry to someone. This personification is also seen throughout the poem and gives life to the main theme of this text.

The anaphora of actions at the beginning of stanza 1, 2 and 4: “I ask”, “I say”, “I want” gives also the dimension of a class. It suggests the idea that the speaker is a teacher talking to a class (or the readers) about poetry and that he describes what he is talking about and what he wants them to say.

Moreover, the enthusiastic tone emphasizes on this impression of a teacher wanting the best for his students. In the first five stanzas, the manner the poem is written is enthusiastic, he gives pleasant images to his students, he wants them to have fun and to “waterski across the surface of the poem” in line 9 for example. But the two last stanzas show a disillusioned and unsatisfied teacher who failed in his attempts and only sees students which didn’t understand what he wants. They are “beating the poem with a hose” in line 15 and they “torture a confession out of it” in line 14 instead of having fun with it. The students are concentrating on the themes of the poem rather than having fun with all the images it contains.

Finally, the depiction of teaching is interesting in this poem as he the teacher analyzes the poem in a different way. He uses images referring to exploration like “hold it up to the light like a color slide” or “press an ear against its hive” to explain the way he wants his students to study a poem. Words like “analyze”, “explain” or “literary devices” are absent of the poem even if it talks about an introduction to poetry.

This different way of understanding and working on a text is directly linked to the second theme of this poem: the exploration of a poem.

There are a lot of images referring to this theme, all more meaningful than the others.

Some are showing the mystery about a poem and how we think it is dangerous at first. “Pressing an ear against the poem’s hive” or “walking inside the poem’s room to feel the walls for a light switch” are the perfect example of this theme. Even if they are linked to the main theme of exploration, the dangerousness is expressed with the words “hive” or “dark”. The metaphors used to compare a poem to a room or a hive shows that it is full of items or bees which are words in a poem, all different and all important. A hive cannot work if bees are missing, same for a poem.

Other images are really concentrated on discovery and mystery. “Holding up a poem to the light like a color slide” or “dropping

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