Lesson Plans

Assignment to have been completed: Students should read “Introduction to Poetry,” pp. 723, in Perrine’s Literature and written out responses to the questions that follow on p. 724.

Objectives:

Activities:

• A. Analyze “Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins.

  • 1. What is the basic situation of the poem? Who are “I” (1) and “them (1)?

    The speaker (“I”) is probably a teacher or a poet or a poet/teacher who wants to arouse his students (“them”) to react to a poem as an experience rather than as a statement or message.

  • 2. Explain the simile in line 3. From that point onward through line 11, the speaker invents a series of metaphors. For each of them, define what a poem is being compared to and how the metaphor expresses some characteristic quality of poetry. For example, how is a poem like a “hive” (4) full of buzzing bees?

    The simile compares a poem to “a color slide.” A slide held up to the light does not reveal much; to do more requires a slide projector and a screen to make a full impact on the viewer. In other words, the simile says that the full power of a poem is only barely sensed when it looks like a miniature picture. It requires projected light (insight, perhaps, or imagination) and magnification (intense interest, perhaps, or curiosity) to yield its experience. It suggests that the surface meaning might be enough.

    The first metaphor compares a poem to a beehive. A poem, like a beehive, is full of movement, a place of reproductive activity and stored sweetness, and it buzzes as a sign of the richness of its life. One must listen as well as look, and consider both interior and exterior signification.

    The second metaphor compares a poem to a maze with twists and turns ultimately leading to freedom and release.

    The third metaphor compares a poem to a dark room in which the reader gropes for some source of illumination hat will suddenly make everything starkly clear.

    The fourth metaphor compares reading a poem to water-skiing. It underscores active reading, demonstrating the rush of excitement and pleasure, the exhilarating face of a deep, sustaining body of water that is identified in the distance by the creator of that element.

  • 3. The last five lines present a single extended metaphor to express what “they want to do” when they encounter a poem. What are “they” and “the poem” compared to, and how do these comparisons reflect a different attitude toward poetry from the ones expressed in the first 11 lines? What, ultimately does this poem express about poetry and its readers?

    The readers (“they”) are compared to a brutal interrogator and the poem itself to a criminal suspect who won’t talk.

    The poem is tied down and tortured and beaten because it will not state in plain terms “what it really means.”

    The frustrated readers are looking for the key, the magic stone, or what Perrine calls the prose meaning. Not joy nor excitement, but information, is what these readers demand.

Assignment for next class meeting: Read “Figurative Language 2 – Symbol, Allegory,” pp. 725-736, in Perrine’s Literature. Write responses to Exercise 1 on page 736.