Trouble With Poetry

In “The Trouble with Poetry”, and “Introduction to Poetry” Billy Collins focuses on the issue of forced inspiration, and the lack of appreciation readers, and aspiring poets have for the feel of poetry. In “Introduction to Poetry”, Collins mentions that some poetry enthusiasts try too hard to find the meaning of a poem; to try and decipher it like some ancient hieroglyphics, that they forget that poetry is not an essay and does not necessarily have to have a distinct message. In stanza’s seven and eight, the speaker states that poetry should be felt, and that what one poem means to a group of people could have a completely different effect on another group. In stanza eight “Feel the walls” is the speaker’s ways of saying that one should feel a poem and let the poem speak to them, instead of searching for what they believe to be its true meaning. In “The Trouble with Poetry” the speaker touches on the same idea of how poetry is so forced, and how it has lost its meaning as an expression and has become more of an addiction among

In “Introduction to poetry”, the speakers audience are those who read poetry, while in “The Trouble with poetry”, he is speaking to poets themselves. In “Introduction to Poetry, the speaker is convincing the readers to let a poem engulf them instead of trying to “torture a confession” out of it or in other words search for the “true meaning” of it. He introduces the idea of surrendering to a poem instead of trying to figure out “what it really means”. On the other hand, in “The Trouble with Poetry”, the speaker is trying to urge aspiring poets to let inspiration come to them instead of searching for it. He suggesets that the more time you spend waiting for a “little flame”, the more insecure you will be about your abilities as a poet, which leads to written work that does not come from the