What Are The Poetic Devices Used In Billy Collins's Poetry

Former US poet laureate Billy Collins has made his mark on modern poetry. Addressing topics from pears to poetry itself, Collins’ unique writing style helps his poems become more relatable to most readers. Like many modern poets, Collins writes in free verse, eliminating formal structure and allowing creativity to blend in to every line. In his poems “Budapest”, and “The Dead”, Collins uses various poetic devices to create meaning for the reader. YouTube animators Julian Grey and Juan Delcan take creative liberties in their visual representations of these two poems. The poetic devices used in Collins’ writings and the visual and auditory representations of his poems respectively form different meanings in the readers or viewers mind. In Billy Collins’ poem “Budapest”, his pen is compared to a “strange animal” (Line 2). Collins uses personification and a simile to show that this “strange animal” has a mind of its own as it moves around the paper looking for sustenance in the form of ink that will allow it to continue writing. While the pen moves, the speaker is imagining places he has never been, such as Budapest. The contrasting imagery …show more content…
With this connection, the reader feels like the dead have a sense of protection over the living. The poem flows well by listing mundane activities in the reader’s daily life. Collins presents this poem as a blessing of sorts, a blessing in knowing that the deceased provide the comfort of knowing that they remain alive in the hearts and minds of those they have left behind. The dead “think we are looking back at them” and so they wait for their loved ones to “close [their] eyes” (Lines 8, 10). Collins chooses to use the imagery of an individual closing his or her eyes to mean death. This poem has a very pensive tone, and each reader can interpret it