Williams And Billy Collins Essay

William Carlos Williams and Billy Collins are both fantastic poets, with similar structure (or lack thereof) and style of poetry. In each of the combined eight poems, they all contained little to no rhyming and followed unique structure, with little to no repetition in any stanza (the only exception being Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow”). Likewise, both poets typically employ the use of an upbeat and optimistic tone in their poems, though they will both switch to a more neutral tone if the situation requires (Williams’s “Spring and All” and Collins’s “Cliché”). In general, both poets write in a style free of restrictions that allows them to express themselves in any way they deem necessary. Throughout his poems, Collins has established himself as something of a “fun” poet: …show more content…
In “The History Teacher”, Collins shows a teacher using wordplay to give his students a different take on history, with lines such as “The War of the Roses took place in a garden”. With “Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes”, Collins explains how exhausting it is to analyze Dickinson and her poems through the metaphor of undressing her, mocking the complexity subtly throughout, then summing it all up at the end with “and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed, the way some readers sigh when they realize that Hope has feathers, that reason is a plank, that life is a loaded gun that looks right at you with a yellow eye”. His poem “Cliché” explores the popular cliché that “life is an open book”, but in a cool twist actually explores in depth how people viewing his life are like those viewing an autobiography. Finally, “Sonnet” is perhaps his most crowning achievement in setting himself apart from his fellow poets, going so far as to make fun of a specific form of poetry and succeeding magnificently. On a surface level, the poem looks like a sonnet, but upon further examination it is revealed that there is no rhyme