At first glance, the reader is led to believe the poem “Fishing on the Susquehanna in July” to be a poem full of actual fishing experiences on the Susquehanna. Instead, it is evident in Collins’s writing of the irony, tone, descriptive imagery, and the stressing of certain words, that the poem is about not about fishing on the Susquehanna, nor the speaker’s negative view of fishing on the Susquehanna. Comparatively Collins concealed his poem to really be about a person’s search for experiences in their life. Along with the idea that, poetry is an art and the poet is an artist, equal to that of great painters, and can maybe be on the same ground as the men of nature, fisherman.
The poem is told through first-person narrative by a persona. The