For poems that are often considered obscure, the 1746 Odes of William Collins have sparked surprisingly little debate in the criticism that has grown around them in the last two hundred years. Outside of a handful of minor controversies,¹ the critical literature overall is sadly homogeneous. Again and again, antecedents and models for the Odes are located in Milton, in Spenser, in Aristotle;² Collins is seen as a self-conscious "genius," a lonely singer of songs who, as such, prefigures the romantic poets;³ and poems themselves are described as visionary, pictorial, and sublime essays of the poetical imagination which combine within the odic form the tradition of the progress poem and the device of personification.⁴ In the midst of this fairly monotonous chorus of praise, a few critics have raised a single note of objection that should momentarily have caused a universal, reflective silence. Musgrove, for one, suggested that the very subjects of the Odes present a formidable and unsettling problem: "They do not seem to be about very much—or, at least, not about anything very interesting."⁵ Another, Middleton Murry, argued that Collins' poetic "came near preventing him from having anything to express at all," that he sought "a perilous kind of purity that … hovers on the verge of emptiness."⁶ For all their structural intricacy and verbal extravagance, the Odes seem, finally, to be without content.

By profession, most critics would take issue with such a disagreeable notion. Indeed, over the years, many have suggested various subjects for the poems. Currently there is more or less a consensus that all of the odes represent (sometimes remotely) variations or manifestations of the subject A. S. P. Woodhouse claimed for the "Ode on the Poetical Character": "the creative imagination and the poet's passionate desire for its power,"⁷ or, in Martha Collins' words, "the difficulty of writing poems or attaining the heights of former poets."⁸ As Musgrove has it, "each Ode is descriptive of one of the qualities or circumstances essential to the attainment of the Poet's true stature."⁹ But while true enough, these articulations are in themselves insufficient. Beside the poems about poetry of Stevens, say, or of Pope—full-bodied explorations of a very weighty subject matter—many of the 1746 Odes still seem to hover "on the verge of emptiness."

But if it is vain to search in them for conventional subject matter, how can we at once answer the objection and come to terms with these beautiful and elusive odes? Northrop Frye's distinction between product and process in literature is pertinent here. For Frye, the poetry of product is Aristotelian, esthetic, and objective; in it, the poet is present only as the voice of anonymous, authoritative communication. Like a weather report, the poetry of product is concerned with the external state of things, with subject matter. The poetry of process, by contrast, is Longinian and psychological; in it, "the qualities of subconscious association take the lead, and the poetry becomes hypnotically repetitive, incantatory, dreamlike and in the original sense of the word charming."¹⁰ The poetry of process is oracular, ecstatic, trance-like, subjective. Now if we accept Paul Sherwin's suggestion that "Collins' poetry contains all the characteristics of a poetry of process delineated by Frye,"¹¹ this distinction enables us to accept Collins' seeming lack of subject matter, his "emptiness," more easily. Perhaps it is not subjects that Collins seeks at all, but rather a kind of visionary process. But precisely what kind of a process is at work, and to what end?

Critics have sought to describe the 1746 Odes with an exuberant but often foggy vocabulary. C. R. Stone has mentioned the "magic of the poems," Bloom their "apocalyptic ambition," McKillop their "primal rapture." Shuster has described the poems as "groping towards a visionary neo-Platonism," Sypher as "preconscious" and "bizarre" psychic representations which "may amount occasionally to surrealism." Barbauld sees in the Odes "the metaphysical," Frye a kind of "poetic primitivism," and Ainsworth an "evocation of a shadowy and visionary world." Hazlitt, for his part, says of Collins that he "catches rich glimpses of the bowers of Paradise," that a "rich distilled perfume emanates from the 'Ode on the Poetical Character' like a breath of genius: a golden cloud envelops it, a honeyed paste of diction encrusts it, like a candied coat of auricula."¹² Each of these terms is unhelpful. Each is vague, esoteric, and, for those of us who do not believe in magic, unconvincing; I cite them only to suggest that too few of Collins' critics have extracted from his obvious concern with visionary experience its essence: immediacy in the literal sense, a fusion of subject and object.¹³

For Collins' Odes concern primarily the problem of immediacy, the process of attaining an unmediated experience in which votary becomes one with the invoked. This is, of course, the concern of much lyric poetry. But, as we shall see, in the 1746 Odes this process differs from most lyric modalities in at least one fundamental respect: immediacy for Collins is a radically linguistic phenomenon. Moreover, the very condition of Collins' project to broach immediate experience renders the enterprise impossible from the start. It is the consequence of this aporia that we must ultimately explore. First, however, it will be useful to articulate in some detail the poetic process by which unmediated experience is sought.

This process, I think, can be described with the terms that Ernst Cassirer, utilizing Usener's notion of the "momentary god," brought to his speculative but, for our purposes, extremely useful discussion of language and myth. For Cassirer, the geneses of language and myth are coincidental, simultaneous. The primal, immediate experience, the dramatic confrontation of pre-linguistic man with any form of intensity (leopard, precipice, thunder, or mountain spring bursting forth from the ground) provokes a kind of mythical awe in which thought "is captivated and enthralled by the intuition which suddenly confronts it."¹⁴ Faced with such phenomena, all thought

comes to rest in the immediate experience; the sensible present is so great that everything else dwindles before it. For a person whose apprehension is under the spell of this mythico-religious attitude, it is as though the whole world were simply annihilated; the immediate content, whatever it be, that commands his religious interest so completely fills his consciousness that nothing else can exist beside or apart from it. (pp. 32-33)

Confronted in this way with immediate experience, the self locates "all its energy on this single object, lives in it," indeed, dissolves (p. 33).

Immediacy, then, constitutes a profoundly reductive situation in which the self is overcome or "possessed" by the intense impression. For Cassirer, it is precisely at this moment that the deity originates. When immediate apprehension annihilates the sense of self, "when external reality is not merely viewed and contemplated, but overcomes a man in sheer immediacy, with emotions of fear or hope, terror or wish fulfillment," precisely then the "utmost tension between the subject and its object" arises. At that moment, "the spark jumps somehow across, the tension finds release, as the subjective excitement becomes objectified, and confronts the mind as a god or daemon." Leopard, shooting star, or field of dazzling yellow poppies—all can constitute Usener's mythico-religious protophenomena, all can evoke the momentary god in whose presence the wonderer, awestruck, loses all sense of self to the deity. "In absolute immediacy," as Usener has it, "the individual phenomenon is deified, without the intervention of even the most rudimentary class concept; that one thing you see before you, that and nothing else is the god" (p. 33).

Borrowing this set of notions, we can say that for Collins the process of evoking immediate, visionary experience involves what Cassirer would call a primeval confrontation with phenomena that become, from their force and intensity, momentary gods.¹⁵ Now the direct confrontation of pre-linguistic man with a momentary god gives birth to language; it constitutes a "dynamic process which produces the verbal sound out of its own inner drive" (p. 34). The word or cry thus generated is ontologically inseparable from the confrontation that produced it.

The word, like a god or a daemon, confronts man not as a creation of his own, but as something existent and significant in its own right, as an objective reality. As soon as the spark has jumped across, as soon as the tension and the emotion of the moment has found its discharge in the word or the mythical image, a sort of turning point has occurred in human mentality: the inner excitement which was a mere subjective state has vanished, and has been resolved into the objective form of myth or speech. (p. 36)

The word was God or, to cite Jacques Derrida's revision of St. John, "the sign and the divinity have the same place and time of birth."¹⁶ The genesis of myth, then, is inscribed in the first utterance. And equally, the first utterance marks the origin of the deity, the inauguration of myth.

This first utterance is unlike any word in our language essentially in having a character that is purely expressive; intrinsically free from any symbolic or referential value, it denotes nothing. One way of articulating the precise nature of this utterance is to describe it, using Charles Peirce's terminology, as indexical. For Peirce, the relation of an indexical sign and its object is based on physical proximity, immediacy.¹⁷ Peirce distinguishes symbolic signs, which bear a conventional or learned relation with their objects, from indexical signs, which bear with their objects purely a relation of proximity. Each and every word in our language is, in this sense, a symbolic sign; each can be used to refer to phenomena outside of immediate perception, each can be used to denote symbolically. By contrast, no word in our language can properly be called indexical. Indices are generated only in and by the physical presence of their objects; rather than denote objects or events either concretely present or perfectly abstract, indices express proximities, immediacies. Thus smoke is an indexical sign of fire because it can occur only proximate to fire. Or again, a pointing finger is an index of, say, a chalk-board: it "signifies its object solely by virtue of being really connected with it."¹⁸

Now, without wishing to overemphasize the applicability, I would argue that this vocabulary can help us to describe with some precision the visionary process at work in several at least of Collins' 1746 Odes. Collins seeks to re-create what we can call the experience of the momentary god, an experience that is coincidental with a mythical, indexical utterance. This process is necessarily invocatory; Collins is concerned with invoking a personification not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself; not as a mere rhetorical device, but in order to experience the personification as a momentary god.¹⁹

Invocation, it is true, is not in itself an extraordinary procedure in poetry. Indeed, it is commonplace, for many poets, a conventional and rather official device. It is useful to think of invocation as a particular kind of speech act which John L. Austin would call an "illocution," an attempt by the speaker to manipulate a hearer.²⁰ For Austin, every transaction of language is "locutionary" in the sense that it constitutes an act of verbal utterance, a linguistic event. Under this rubric, two kinds of specialized locutionary speech acts, "illocutions" and "perlocutions," can be differentiated. An illocution shares with all perlocutions the possibility of altering the condition of the hearer. It is unique, however, in being accomplished merely by communicating its intent to accomplish something.²¹ Refining Austin's taxonomy, John Searle discerns twelve types of illocutionary verbs, one of which he calls a directive illocutionary verb: "ask, order, command, request, beg, plead, pray, entreat, and also invite, permit, advise," and, we might add, invoke.²²

We can say, then, that many of Collins' Odes have the directive illocutionary force of invoking a personification. Of Simplicity, for instance, the speaker implores:

But of course all invocations are intended to have the illocutionary force of raising the specter of some deity, muse, personification, or power. What sets these particular utterances apart is that, for Collins, to invoke—literally to call, to give voice to—is precisely to enact an indexical illocution. The poet is concerned with generating an impossible process by which he experiences an unmediated state of being, an instant of concrete intensity, in short, the advent of a momentary god. Recalling Frye, we can say that Collins' is a poetry of process which attempts to bring subject and object "into a white-hot fusion of identity."²⁴ Collins calls on the various deities neither to carry him from the "dim-discovered tracts of mind,"²⁵ nor for mere poetic inspiration; rather, he invokes through indexical illocution a state of absolute immediacy and reciprocity with a momentary god.²⁶

We might suggest, then, that the particularity of Collins' visionary poetic lies precisely in his efforts to enact an indexical modality. Thus the apostrophe, just cited, in the "Ode to Simplicity" functions inseparably from the deity it addresses; its prayer for Simplicity's charms is itself charming; carmen is invoked by carmen. Such, also, is the force in the "Ode to Pity" of the poet's words to the deity:

This moment can be described as an illocutionary speech act that serves at once to invoke and to constitute the presence of the deity. Since design in the eighteenth century denoted—alongside its modern (often architectural) meaning—"nominate," "appoint," "designate," "signify," the word here carries at least two senses: to design(ate) is simultaneously to experience the momentary god; to signify is at once to provide fitting habitation for the deity. The invocation, then, functions just as the temple it portrays; it honors, signifies, and at the same time houses the deity. Collins' visionary language articulates an indexical epiphany; as in the "Ode to Liberty," even as it speaks, it enacts, it consecrates a "place so fit" (10), a "shrine" (9) for the momentary god. Such, too, is the nature of the prayer with which the "Ode to Simplicity" concludes:

Here, rather than a fleeting fusion with the deity, a spirited but momentary "divine excess," the poet seeks a kind of prolonged cohabitation, a sustained reciprocity in which the "meeting soul" of the votary lifts itself to the uplifting deity. The indexical mode of this invocation gives rise to a striking reflexivity; just as the poetry that announces the privileging of simplicity over "divine excess" is itself simple and "temperate," like Simplicity's "vale," so the prayer for song is itself song, a sounding "reed."²⁷ In Richard Wendorf's words, Collins "calls for a fusion of his spirit that will lead, in turn, to an increased ability on his part to inspirit [the deity's] qualities in his own sweet and breathing lines."²⁸ We will discover, however, that such a reciprocity can be neither sustained nor, strictly speaking, even broached. Collins' richness and power lie, instead, in the rhetorical dexterity with which this unattainable condition of fusion is approached.

Despite the claims of the "Ode to Simplicity," despite its avowed preference for mildness and decorum, the experience of the momentary god in Collins is sometimes approximated violently, through excess, without warning or preparation. In the "Ode to Fear," the deity appears suddenly, abruptly:

Ah Fear! Ah frantic Fear!
I see, I see thee near.
(5-6)

In The Fate of Reading, Geoffrey Hartman ascribes to this ode an epiphanic structure that "evokes the presence of a god, or vacillates sharply between imagined presence and absence. Its rhetoric is therefore a crisisrhetoric" which "proceeds by dramatic turns of mood" with an ejaculative language.²⁹ The momentary god or, in Hartman's terms, the confrontational epiphany can erupt at any moment. A number of the 1746 Odes—one thinks, for instance, of "The Passions. An Ode for Music" and of the "Ode on the Poetical Character"—exhibit this sharp, confrontational sublimity. Indeed, even the relatively mild "Ode to Liberty" has its moments of "crisis":

This Gothicism stands in sharp contrast with the classical restraint embodied by Simplicity, who

Too few critics have recognized the range in Collins' poetry from "Attic" simplicity to "Gothic" sublimity, from the modulated restraint of the Mediterranean South to the darker "excesses" of the North. For though the "Ode to Liberty," for instance, embodies admirably the politeness and sobriety of eighteenth-century neoclassicism, though in it "Graecia's graceful orders join" (119) alike within the deity and the poem itself, the ode is nevertheless given to "dramatic turns of mood," to awful, Northern flashes of light:

At other times, of course, the experience of the momentary god is less overtly, less frantically epiphanic. Sometimes it is broached only through an elaborate, incantatory language, as in the "Ode to Evening," the first sentence of which is worth quoting here in full:

Hartman notes Collins' deployment, here, of "features characteristic of the sublime ode…. His extended apostrophe suggests the hieratic distance between votary and the invoked power, anticipates at the same time its presence, and leads into a narrative second half describing in greater detail the coming of the divinity and its effect on the poet." For Hartman, however, "the one feature conspicuously absent is the epiphany proper"; the poem is necessarily all anticipation without arrival because the poet addresses "in epiphanic terms a subject intrinsically nonepiphanic."³¹ And, to be sure, the invocation is preparatory, unagitated, even elusive; it is given to digressions, to intricate embroidery. The language itself, so far from being ejaculative, is convoluted and indirect, the main clause in the deep structure—"Now teach me, maid composed, / To breathe some softened strain"—elaborately embedded in the twisting labyrinth the syntax coils around it.

Nevertheless, the "Ode to Evening" is only seemingly "nonepiphanic." The troublesomeness and opacity of this passage, the convoluted and interwoven syntax, are part of a rhetorical machinery calculated not only to prepare the poet for the deity, but indeed to enact an epiphanic modality. Meandering is for Collins a ritualistic strategy; it functions as a kind of incantation designed to invoke the experience of the momentary god with indexical language, a way of searching for a fleeting and elusive experience which can neither be reached by direct approach nor fixed by a formula. Thus, far from delaying, this "musing slow" constitutes the experience of the deity. When finally the deity is glimpsed, it is glimpsed because the barrier between the "epiphanic terms" and an "intrinsically nonepiphanic" subject has collapsed, because the hypnotic, ritualistic language has approximated, briefly, the very condition of indexicality: "I hail / Thy genial loved return!" The illocutionary force of hailing is merely to state the intention: I salute and invite, I welcome. In the indexical mode, however, the illocution, like a spell, gains the power to accomplish its intention: to hail is simultaneously to confront and fuse with the deity. Wendorf, citing Michael Fried's fine essay on absorption as a master theme in eighteenth-century painting and criticism, argues that at such moments votary and invoked exchange roles. "The speaker is completely absorbed by the spectacle he views (and creates), … is actually absorbed into the object of his contemplation."³² But it would be slightly more accurate, I think, simply to say that in Collins' visionary poetic the barrier between poet and momentary god is dissolved, or, rather, that the rhetoric approximates such dissolution.

Càssirer's explanation is particularly applicable here. The word uttered at the advent of the momentary god is not a

mere conventional symbol, but is merged with its object in an indissoluble unity. The conscious experience is not merely wedded to the word, but is consumed by it. Whatever has been fixed by a name, henceforth is not only real, but is Reality.³³

The barrier between symbol and meaning dissolves. Visionary reciprocity ensues, in Cassirer's words, "a relation of identity, of complete congruence between 'image' and 'object,' between the name and the thing" (58). At precisely those moments when an indexical modality is approximated, Collins attempts momentarily to suspend language as a medium solely for conveying separate content, in order to resurrect, alongside referential utterance, a kind of absolutely reflexive language inseparable from its origin and content. Like the "pilgrim," we are borne along, as it were, in "heedless hum."

In the "Ode to Fear," this experience takes on an unusual ferocity. The poet, having invoked the deity—"Ah Fear! Ah frantic Fear! / I see, I see thee near" (5-6)—himself becomes fearful: "O Fear, I know thee by my throbbing heart" (42). But Fear, too, is fearful, looks "madly wild" (25). Poet and momentary god fuse into a volatile reflexivity:

I know thy hurried step, thy haggard eye!
Like thee I start, like thee disordered fly.
(7-8)

Or again:

Who, Fear, this ghastly train can see,
And look not madly wild like thee?
(24-25)

Fear, too, starts and flies from her hideous train, that is, from her attendant self. Hartman's comment here is illuminating: "We easily recognize this as a displaced or heightened mode of ritual identification…. Collins is not unwittingly adapting Horace's 'Si vis me flere.' If you want me to be terrified, you yourself must show terror." Indeed, a number of the odes "raise the ghosts they shudder at. Their histrionic, sometimes hysterical, character stems from the fact that they are indeed theatrical machines, evoking a power of vision they fear to use. Collins, like a sorcerer's apprentice, is close to being overpowered by the spirit he summons."³⁴ The presence of the momentary god is simultaneously desired and feared.

In "The Passions. An Ode for Music," we discover how completely the deities themselves are given to the experience of reflexivity:

Wendorf has astutely described the reflexive nature of this relation between subject and object.³⁵ What he has not emphasized, however, is its volatility.

For if it can be said properly to occur at all, the experience of the momentary god occurs "but once" and lasts but "awhile." Fear's is a forceful but, after all, a "withering power." The Manners are "ever varying as they pass." And Peace wears a "transient smile."³⁶ This brevity, of course, is the very stuff of the progress poem. Pity, Fear, Simplicity, Liberty—all alight, as it were, upon the various Western cultures only briefly before flying off. The image of the veil—which, in one form or another, is central to Collins' mythmaking process—provides an apt visual manifestation of this volatility. This image occurs at significant and highly charged moments in the Odes. In the "Ode on the Poetical Character," it is behind a "veiling cloud" (37) that God and Fancy give birth, through a "quasisexual" union, to the "rich-haired youth of morn" (39), whom Frye and Bloom associate with the sun-god, the Greek Apollo, and ultimately with the poet himself.³⁷ In the "Ode to Evening," the goddess draws her "gradual dusky veil" (40) between herself and the poet.³⁸ And in the "Ode to Fear," Jocasta is wrapped in the deity's "cloudy veil" (38), which, when lifted by Fancy, reveals the awful personification (4 ff.). For the veil hangs between poet and personification. When it is lifted, immediacy, the experience of the momentary god, ensues; when drawn down again, the moment passes and the condition of separation and exile resumes.

But the veil is language itself or, more properly, the linguistic medium, the very thing that can never simply be "lifted" away. As we have seen, the veil undergoes a double movement in Collins. For Fancy—the very force that in the "Ode to Fear" "lifts the veil" (4) and elsewhere gives birth to poetry itself—also curtains off the scene, presumably of her own inspiration. As we learn in the "Ode on the Poetical Character":

What creates the poetical imagination, then, also destroys it; what opens, also closes the curtain. "Vision plots the end of vision." The will to immediacy is infected from the beginning with the "destiny of its non-satisfaction."³⁹ Behind the dream of a non-referential, indexical language, of a field of discourse in which signifier and signified are inextricable, lies a profound contradiction. The project to create immediate experience through the linguistic medium, to use a thoroughly referential language in order to move beyond referentiality itself—this, of course, is deeply problematical. Paul Sherwin warns of the "danger, indeed the impossibility" even of

pursuing such an ideal. To abandon oneself to the intensity of a continuous present ("to be an intensity without realizing it," as Gaston Bachelard writes) would be to live out existence in the manner of a Nietzschean Superman—an even more unlikely role for Collins than for Nietzsche himself.⁴⁰

As Paul de Man points out, "unmediated expression is a philosophical impossibility." The belief that "in the language of poetry, sign and meaning can coincide, or at least be related to each other in the free and harmonious balance that we call beauty," is incoherent, as the structuralist critics never tire of insisting, a "specifically romantic delusion." "Immediacy," in Derrida's words, "is derived."⁴¹

What lies at the heart of this incoherency? It is, I think, the law of language itself. The perennial yearning in language that language be transparent. The dream of full presence: the white-hot fusion, the sheer reciprocity of subject and object; "the very place," in de Man's words, "where the contact with a superhuman origin of language has been preserved"⁴²; a condition of transcendence, self-identity, radicality; in our terms, absolute indexical proximity of symbol and meaning; the experience of the momentary god; immediacy itself. Each of these, again, is delusory, incoherent, and carries within itself "the destiny of its non-satisfaction." At the same time, each echoes the impossible moment that inaugurates language itself: the desire to capture immediate experience in a system of mediation. This is the special burden of the poet's words, here worth repeating, in the "Ode to Liberty":

Such is the desire for the "restitution of presence by language." Yet, however tenacious the will is for immediacy, however sincere or eloquent, "the presence that is thus delivered to us in the present is a chimera."⁴³

What constitutes Collins' project, then, is an impossible dream. Language is irreducibly metaphorical and non-indexical. Each of its symbols is rent from its meaning as the very condition of its "iterability," that is, of its usefulness. There is no inaugurating moment—to speak of—when signifier and signified are one, when "the word, like a god or a daemon, confronts man not as a creation of his own, but as something existent and significant in its own right, as an objective reality." There is no momentary god, only the incoherent yearning of an encrusted language for immediacy, a golden age. "The Passions. An Ode for Music," for instance, bears the burden of this knowledge:

When Music, heavenly maid, was young,
While yet in early Greece she sung,
The Passions oft to hear her shell
Thronged around her magic cell,
Exulting, trembling, raging, fainting,
Possessed beyond the muse's painting;
By turns they felt the glowing mind,
Disturbed, delighted, raised, refined.
(1-8)

The relation here of Music and the Passions emblematizes the condition of indexicality, a kind of transparent and absolute reciprocity. But Collins insists on the gulf that separates us from any Edenic moment; as always, a fall has intervened and ruptured the unity:

Till once, 'tis said, when all were fired,
Filled with fury, rapt, inspired,
From the supporting myrtles round
They snatched her instruments of sound,
And as they oft had heard apart
Sweet lessons of her forceful art,
Each, for madness ruled the hour,
Would prove his own expressive power.
(9-16)

Sherwin points out that each of the Passions—Fear, Anger, Despair, Hope, Revenge, and so forth—"reen-acts Collins' vocational quest. Displaying 'his own expressive power,' each of the Passions corresponds to the performing self of Collins' various odes." When Fear, for instance, recoils "even at the sound himself ha[s] made" (20), we are reminded of Collins' tendency to recoil from the momentary gods his own lyre has conjured up. Nor is this tendency surprising. Since "the ecstatic aim of the individual Passions is immediate self-presence, the coincidence of cause and effect through the medium of sound,"⁴⁴ and since Collins, too, attempts to intermingle the mutually exclusive experiences of ecstacy and self-presence, to broach immediacy through media, his project is marked from the start by the condition of its own impossibility.

"The Passions," then, amounts to a mythic conceit for the fallen condition of language itself, communicative power violently separated both from its source and its telos. The archaeology that would unearth the site "where the contact with a superhuman origin of language has been preserved" in the end discovers only that the origin, "the point where the truth of things corresponded to a truthful discourse," lies at a "place of inevitable loss."⁴⁵ As Hartman, himself citing Cassirer, states, "standing in the midst of things, and specifically in the midst of the treachery of words, the artist bears the curse of mediacy."⁴⁶Immediacy is the momentary god; and she, like the deity in Collins'"Ode to Simplicity," has "turned [her] face, and fled her altered land." (36)

In Collins, as in Christopher Smart, "the very medium of representation—visionary language itself—has become questionable, or subject to a demand which it cannot meet except by being renewed." But for Collins this project of renewal itself functions as the condition of its own impossibility; again and again, it begins and culminates, not in renewal, but in the anxiety of lateness; not in immediacy, but in a poignant and empty longing, a profound fear "that our appetites—including that for presence—put a demand on the order of things which that order may not be able to satisfy; which, indeed, it may resent and reject." Far from a fusion with a momentary god, what Collins' poetic in the end enacts is a language of loss, a profound "anxiety for language-source, liturgy, and the entire process of representation."⁴⁷

This loss, again, is thematically intrinsic to the progress poem. In the "Ode to Liberty," for instance, we learn that only the scattered fragments of the deity remain, mere "remnants of her strength" (29):

For sunny Florence, seat of art,
Beneath her vines preserved a part,
Till they, whom Science loved to name,
(O who could fear it?) quenched her flame.
And lo, an humbler relic laid
In jealous Pisa's olive shade!
See small Marino joins the theme,
Though least, not last in thy esteem;
Strike, louder strike the ennobling strings
To those whose merchant sons were kings;
To him who, decked with pearly pride,
In Adria weds his green-haired bride;
Hail, port of glory, wealth and pleasure,
Ne'er let me change this Lydian measure:
Nor e'er her former pride relate
To sad Liguria's bleeding state.
(34-49)

As she alights on Florence, Pisa, San Marino, and so forth, Liberty's power is strangely dispersed, enervated; Florence "preserved" but "a part" of the deity, Pisa a still "humbler relic." And today of Liberty's "former pride" only the "beauteous model still remains" (106). Collins is himself quite explicit about the futility of recovering the site of immediacy:

Though now with hopeless toil we trace
Time's backward rolls to find its place;

Whether the fiery-tressed Dane,
Or Roman's self o'erturned the fane,
Or in what heaven-left age it fell,
'Twere hard for modern song to tell
(95-100)

The fall of the Roman Empire is here rewritten as an allegory of the inevitable disruption of immediacy. To ask whether the "fane," the very temple of immediacy, has been "o'erturned" from within by "Roman's self or from without by "the fiery-tressed Dane" is at once to ask whether language conditions or is conditioned by the inevitability of mediacy. But meanwhile the question itself enacts reflexively the very problematic it raises. Because "modern song" is by definition late, post-lapsarian, it functions inevitably in exile and as exile. These lines, then, encapsulate in miniature the dilemma, the condition of separation, at the heart of the 1746 Odes. This is precisely what it means to be exiled from the locus of immediacy: always searching—and always within language—for the "site of a fleeting articulation that discourse has obscured and finally lost."⁴⁸

It is hardly surprising, then, that Collins is forever hesitating to commit himself to the endless quest for the site of immediacy. As one critic has noticed, Collins is indirect and taciturn; he is characteristically reticent.⁴⁹ Since language never "lifts the veil," but only twists and complicates it, Collins is naturally hesitant to speak and quick to silence. There is in the laconicism of the Odes, and in the thinness of Collins' entire oeuvre, the same archetypal silence that Frederic Jameson noted in Saussure, the "same legendary and august renunciation of speech of which the gesture of Rimbaud is emblematic."⁵⁰ The irony that the ambitions of a programmatically invocatory poet should lead in the end to a half-hidden but nevertheless august renunciation of speech is only apparent. For since the very possiblity of language marks a separation of subject and object, of votary and momentary god, the will to hymn and the will to silence are one and the same movement. Collins announces his project at the opening of "The Manners. An Ode":

Farewell, for clearer ken designed,
The dim-discovered tracts of mind:
Truths which, from action's paths retired,
My silent search in vain required!
(1-4)

Strangely, to abandon this "silent search," to throw aside the "prattling page" (24) and "oft-turned scrolls" (76) of scholarship or art, and to raise the voice in praise of the deity is, in the end, only to embrace another, still deeper silence. As Middleton Murry noticed in 1922, for Collins it is to erect a poetic that almost prevents him "from having anything to express at all," to seek "a perilous kind of purity that … hovers on the verge of emptiness." The dilemma of the Collinsean poetic is at once to speak this silence and to silence this speech; the Odes enact their own elegy. So while it is strange, it is equally inevitable that the dream of immediacy should return finally to the praise of silence.

Notes

¹ Among the controversies, that which has continued longest and loudest is among the literary historians seeking to locate Collins within a particular school. Of those who have labeled him a pre-romantic, J. W. MacKail, "Collins, and the English Lyric," in Essays by Diverse Hands, ed. Henry Newbolt (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), pp. 1-23; Oswald Doughty, English Lyric in the Age of Reason (New York: Russell and Russell, 1922); Alan D. McKillop, "The Romanticism of William Collins," Studies in Philology, 20, No. 1 (1923), pp. 1-16; and Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), pp. 1-15; are interesting. Other critics, among them E. M. W. Tillyard, "William Collins's 'Ode on the Death of Thomson,'" A Review of English Literature, 1, No. 3 (1960), pp. 30-38, insist that Collins is neo-classical. One critic, Wylie Sypher, "The Morceau de Fantaisie in Verse: A New Approach to Collins," University of Toronto Quarterly, 15 (1945-1946), pp. 65-69, even calls Collins rococo. For an old-fashioned, "evolutionary" literary history seeking to place Collins in a transitional period, see George N. Shuster, The English Ode from Milton to Keats (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940).

Another controversy involves a debate over the proper order and categorization of the odes more or less initiated by H. W. Garrod, Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928); and addressed by S. Musgrove, "The Theme of Collins's Odes," Notes and Queries, 9 October 1943, pp. 214-17, and 23 October 1943, pp. 253-55; and Richard Quintana, "The Scheme of Collins's Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects," in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Carrol Camden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 371-80.

Still another controversy concerns the precise nature of Collins' personification. Criticism includes Bertrand H. Bronson, "Personification Reconsidered," ELH, 14, No. 3 (1947), pp. 163-80; Earl R. Wasserman, "The Inherent Values of Eighteenth-Century Personification," PMLA, 65 (1950), pp. 435-63; and Rachel Trickett, "The Augustan Pantheon: Mythology and Personification in Eighteenth-Century Poetry," in Essays and Studies, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London: Wyman and Sons, 1953), pp. 71-86.

Finally, yet another controversy concerns Collins' pictorial relation to painting, criticism of which includes Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism in English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Patricia Meyer Spacks, "Collins' Imagery," Studies in Philology, 62, No. 5 (1965), pp. 719-36; and Michael Fried, "Absorption: A Master Theme in Eighteenth-Century French Painting and Criticism," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 9, No. 2 (1975-1976), pp. 139-77.

² Worthwhile criticism in this tradition includes Norman Maclean, "From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century," in Critics and Criticism, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 404-60; Alan D. McKillop, "Collins's Ode to Evening—Background and Criticism," Tennessee Studies in Literature, 5 (1960), pp. 73-83; A. S. P. Woodhouse, "The Poetry of Collins Reconsidered," in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 93-137; and Paul Sherwin, Precious Bane (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977).

³ See note 1 above and also, for discussions of Collins' self-consciousness, Martha Collins, "The Self-Conscious Poet: The Case of William Collins," ELH, 42, No. 3 (1975), pp. 362-77; and Richard Wendorf, William Collins and Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981).

⁴ See, for instance, the introduction to The Poetical Works of Mr. William Collins, ed. and introd. A. L. Barbauld (n.p.: n.p., 1797); and Edward Gay Ainsworth, Poor Collins (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1937).

⁵ Musgrove, p. 215.

⁶ John Middleton Murry, Countries of the Mind (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1922), pp. 86 and 94.

⁷ A. S. P. Woodhouse, "Collins and the Creative Imagination: A Study in the Background of his Odes," in Studies in English by Members of the University College, Toronto, ed. Wallace (Toronto: n.p., 1931), p. 60.

⁸ Martha Collins, p. 365.

⁹ Musgrove, p. 215.

¹⁰ Northrop Frye, "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility," ELH, 23, No. 2 (1956), pp. 144-52. Direct quotation from p. 148.

¹¹ Sherwin, p. 55.

¹² C. R. Stone, "A Literary Causerie: The Story of a Poem," The Academy, 8 December 1906, p. 587; Bloom, p. 8; McKillop, "Romanticism," p. 15; Shuster, p. 198; Sypher, p. 65; Barbauld, p. v; Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Boston: Beacon Press, 1947), p. 170; Ainsworth, p. 105; Hazlitt, quoted in Garrod, pp. 121 and 122.

¹³ Critics who have discussed this aspect of Collins' poetry include Earl R. Wasserman, "Collins' 'Ode on the Poetical Character,'" ELH, 34, No. 1 (1967); Fried; and Wendorf.

¹⁴ Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (New York: Dover, 1953), p. 32. Hereafter, references will be included parenthetically in the text.

¹⁵ Sherwin first noticed this. See pp. 59 and 69.

¹⁶ Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 14.

¹⁷ Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weill (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1931-1958), III, p. 361.

¹⁸ Peirce, III, p. 361.

¹⁹ See John R. Crider, "Structure and Effect in Collins' Progress Poems," Studies in Philology, 60, No. 1 (1963), p. 60.

²⁰ John L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), passim.

²¹ Jerrold M. Saddock, Toward a Linguistic Theory of Speech Acts (New York: Academic Press, 1974), p. 9. As well as the communication of intention, certain "appropriateness conditions" must be met.

²² John R. Searle, "A Classification of Illocutionary Acts," Language in Society, 5 (1976), p. 11.

²³ William Collins, "Ode to Simplicity," 11. 25-27. All references to the poems are from Roger Lonsdale, ed., The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969). Whenever convenient, line numbers will be included parenthetically in the text.

²⁴ Frye, "Age of Sensibility," p. 152.

²⁵ "The Manners, An Ode," 1. 2.

²⁶ I am indebted here to Paul H. Fry's discussion of invocation in The Poet's Calling in the English Ode (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).

²⁷ This ode, incidentally, exemplifies why it is insufficient to claim that Collins' poems are "about" poetry. The trouble with this assertion is not that it is untrue but, rather, that it is unspecific; for against such claims, we might argue, on the contrary, that they are specifically "about" themselves, that they raise quite overtly the problematic of their own status as utterances.

²⁸ Wendorf, p. 95.

²⁹ Geoffrey Hartman, The Fate of Reading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 126-127.

³⁰ "Ode to Simplicity," 11. 8-11. See Wendorf, p. 94.

³¹ Hartman, p. 138.

³² Wendorf, p. 101.

³³ Cassirer, p. 58. It is interesting to recall, here, how in Collins the function of the name in consecration—"By Pella's bard, a magic name" ("Ode to Pity," 1.7 [see Wendorf, p. 98]); "By old Miletus" ("The Manners. An Ode," 1. 59)—is inseparable from its function in hymn. (Significantly, in the first example, "Pella's bard," Euripides, is not named but is associated with his death-place, and in the second Collins seems to have confused Aristides with the city where he lived. [Lonsdale, p. 475] Thus in both cases, for quite different reasons, we are dealing with toponyms of sorts.) One thinks, for instance, of the "Ode to Liberty"—

The magic works, thou feel'st the strains,
One holier name alone remains;
The perfect spell shall then avail.
Hail nymph, adored by Britain, hail!
(60-64)

—or again, of the "Ode to Evening," which closes with a hymn to the deity:

In a sense, then, absolute indexicality involves the uttering of a truly proper name.

³⁴ Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 326, and n. 29. The footnote continues: "His two odes on fear and pity treat of the 'tragic' emotions, those closest to sacred or ritualistic drama and hence closely concerned with participation [emphasis added]." I would substitute reciprocity for participation.

³⁵ Wendorf, see pp. 97-105.

³⁶ "Ode to Fear," 1. 69; "How Sleep the Brave," 1.11; "Ode to Fear," 1. 43; "The Manners. An Ode," 1. 43; "Ode to Peace," 1. 19.

³⁷ Bloom, p. 9; Frye, Fearful Symmetry, p. 170. Lonsdale (who, incidentally, is not convinced of these associations) reminds us that "God has 'a cloud / Drawn round about [him] like a radiant Shrine' in Par. Lost iii 378-79 and is surrounded by a 'Golden Cloud' at vi 28."

³⁸ Dustin Griffin has an entirely different reading of this moment in the "Ode to Evening." He has suggested to me—quite persuasively—that here, when the veil is drawn down, the poet remains behind it and so has succeeded in a sustained fusing with the deity.

³⁹ Hartman Beyond Formalism, p. 329; Derrida, p. 143.

⁴⁰ Sherwin, p. 55.

⁴¹ Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, introd. Wlad Godzich, 2nd ed. rev. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 9; p. 12; Derrida, p. 157.

⁴² De Man, p. 189.

⁴³ Derrida, p. 153; p. 154.

⁴⁴ Sherwin, p. 58.

⁴⁵ Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 143.

⁴⁶ Hartman, Beyond Formalism, p. 108.

⁴⁷ Hartman, The Fate of Reading, p. 78.

⁴⁸ Foucault, p. 143.

⁴⁹ Martha Collins, passim.

⁵⁰ Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 12.