I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would ... -Billy Collins

I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.

Billy Collins , Poet
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Billy Collins is an American poet known for his accessible and often humorous poetry. He served as the United States Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003 and has published numerous collections of poetry that have garnered critical acclaim and widespread popularity. Collins' ability to connect with readers through his relatable and engaging verses has made him one of the most beloved and celebrated poets of his generation.

Billy Collins Quotes to Explore

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is...
I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes....
Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form o...
Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And t...
When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable...
I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the hom...
Radio is such a perfect medium for the transmission of poetry, primarily because there just is the voice, there's no visual distraction....
Poetry is my cheap means of transportation. By the end of the poem the reader should be in a different place from where he started. I would like him t...
The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the...
A lasting marriage, they say, is one where the two reach for different sections of the Sunday paper. Me, I go right for the obituaries, just like thos...

Poetry Quotes to Explore

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up t...
I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now....
I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry....
However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propell...
And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so....
And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it....
All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous be...
Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry....
Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be relate...
In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre; they are, at the same t...