Billy Collins Quotes

Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents.

In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it.

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

I'm not a pop song lyric writer. I can't just focus on one simple meaning or even a double entendre.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.

There is nothing you can see that is not a Bashoflower; there is nothing you can think that is not the moon.

I seldom deal in symbolisms; if there be hidden meanings in my verse, they are there without my knowledge.

A poem is bound by language, but a poetics is not.

Believe it or not, one of the first poets I was aware of was Yeats. I recited 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' at a verse speaking competition when I was eight or nine.

There's this poet named Walter Benton, I really like his stuff. He always uses landscapes as a metaphor for the female body.

I've hated poetry ever since I was at school. I include Shakespeare in that. I don't understand the obsession with him!

I like bringing my poet brain and sensibility to lyrics I write.

Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.

I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers - to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form.