The sense you get in a poem that the poet takes for granted an interest on the reader’s part in the poet’s autobiographical life, in the poet’s memories, problems, difficulties and even minor perceptions.
BILLY COLLINSA sentence starts out like a lone traveler heading into a blizzard at midnight, tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.
More Billy Collins Quotes
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A motto I’ve adopted is, if at first you don’t succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried.
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I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons.
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This love for everyday things, part natural from the wide eye of Infancy, part a literary calculation
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But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.
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In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
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I see woefully obscure poetry as simply a kind of verbal rudeness.
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The literary world is so full of pretension, and there’s such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they’re ignored by everybody else.
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Listeners are kind of ambushed… if a poem just happens to be said when they’re listening to the radio. The listener doesn’t have time to deploy what I call their ‘poetry deflector shields’ that were installed in high school – there’s little time to resist the poem.
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Form is any aspect of a poem that encourages it to stay whole and not drift off into chaos.
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I find it strange that – at least in my take on it – the people who are the most alarmed about the dire times we live in are the ones who seem to be humorless, in their taste for poetry anyway.
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I thought I would be completely content if I was recognized at some later point in my life as a third-rate Wallace Stevens.
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I mean, the sonnet will simply tell you, that’s too many syllables or that’s too many lines or that’s the wrong place. So, instead of being alone, you’re in dialogue with the form.
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When I wrote I took on the role of the despondent and difficult to understand person. Whereas in life, I was easy to understand, to the point of being simple-minded maybe.
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I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.
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I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn’t know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life.
BILLY COLLINS