For most students, poetry is a complex topic that we all want to avoid. It takes a lot of effort to understand the vague imagery and complicated wordplay to understand the overall message the poet is trying to portray. In the end, we fail to truly enjoy the piece because we are too focused on analyzing everything in the poem. Billy Collins "Introduction to Poetry", criticized this need to torture a poem for its meaning when in reality it should be a slow but fun process to go through. Because of this, it illustrates the way poetry should be approached. He was able to convey his idea through the use of metaphors and images like all of us as the structure of the poem. One thing that stands out in this poem is the number of metaphors the poet uses to compare a poem. For example, in the first stanza, the poet wrote “I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a colored slide” (Collins). Here, the speaker is comparing a poem to a color slide. This establishes a strong imagery of a person visually examining the poem, just as you would when first discovering a new object. By using the term “color slide,” the speaker suggests that what once began as a whimsical tone has now transcended into bitterness. The speaker now personified a poem by physically stating that all the students wanted to do “was tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture it into a confession” (Collins). This highlights students' constant need to overanalyze a poem to find its hidden meaning without actually listening to what it has to say. We are so desperate to find the depth of a poem that we forget to appreciate the art of poetry. By forcefully rebuking a poem for its overall meaning, instead of doing so calmly and freely, takes the fun out of the subject. This in effect makes the topic of the poem a dreaded lesson because of our fixation on the meaning of