I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times - and this, I think, is a sense you develop - I can tell that the line wants to continue.
Billy CollinsRead
I'm happy to stick with my persona. There are themes of love lost and love regained, but the main themes of all poems are basically love and death, and that seems to be the message of poetry.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The essence of poetry often revolves around the experiences of love and mortality.
In this quote, Billy Collins reflects on his poetic themes, asserting that love—both its loss and its recovery—and death are foundational elements of poetry. He acknowledges his persona in this exploration, suggesting that these universal themes resonate deeply within human experience and are central to the message conveyed through poetry.
Themes
PoetryLoveDeathThemesHuman Experience
In practice
Example use cases
During a poetry reading, one might use this quote to explain the dual themes found in many works.
More from Billy Collins
All quotes →People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.
Billy CollinsRead
To a poet, it's quite ruinous to have a poem distorted, out of shape, or squeezed, shall we say, into this tiny screen. But I'm not sure big digital companies are sensitive to the needs of poets.
Billy CollinsRead
All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
Billy CollinsRead
And the reason I am writing this on the back of a manila envelope now that they have left the train together is to tell you that when she turned to lift the large, delicate cello onto the overhead rack, I saw him looking up at her and what she was doing the way the eyes of saints are painted when they are looking up at God when he is doing something remarkable, something that identifies him as God.
Billy CollinsRead
The whole world of publishing is moving to electronic, but when you put a poem on a screen and you increase the type size, the shape of a poem changes.
Billy CollinsRead
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