Imagine being a fly on the wall of a high school English IV classroom. The teacher constantly pesters the students to search for deeper meanings lying within a plethora of poems. Each student is expected to announce his or hers perspective on the poetry to the class. “Think outside of the box,” the teacher repeats. Exaggerated frustration resounds throughout the room as the students’ disinterest in interpretations of poems is highlighted. The teacher mistakes their moans as the laziness of a generation. However, the students would rather find out what the poem really means than concoct an interpretation that could be terribly incorrect. In the poem “Introduction to Poetry,” Billy Collins utilizes the theme of the misconception of opposing…show more content… The English teacher instructs her students to “drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out” and to “walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. Since poems are 2D objects, readers automatically sense the personification of the poem. Readers are allowed to effortlessly imagine a sheet of paper expanding to the size of a room. Feeling for a light switch among the poem’s dark expanse symbolizes a light bulb going off in the mind of a reader once a strong interpretation has been gathered. This light bulb is what the English teacher wishes to spark in the mind of her students. Instead, she believes they will always take the easy way out by using the literal meaning of poetry. “All they want to do,” she says, “is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it.” The poem’s portrayal as a 3D object continues through this line along with imagery. Frustrated English IV students attack poems after failing in the search for a deeper meaning. The students become overwhelmed and feel incompetent that they cannot meet their teacher’s seemingly outrageous standards. They yearn to read poetry and enjoy it for its surface illustration. The complexity of an English IV teacher causes students’ frustration toward poems to cultivate as they only see the need to “find out what it really
