SOURCE: "The Eighteenth-Century Collins," in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 1, March, 1983, pp. 3-22.

William Collins sounds different now from the Collins we used to know. For example, Paul S. Sherwin claims, "Collins feels, all right; but what he feels most urgently is his estrangement from the passionate integrity of unself-conscious or 'unmixed' feeling. Impatient and aching, he is a fever of himself, his intensity springing directly from baffled desire."¹ This feverish figure, "one of the doomed poets of an Age of Sensibility," to use Harold Bloom's words,² reveals, like Smart and "the great Romantics," a "struggle with his vocation," the fate of the post-Miltonic writer.³ He explores problems of sexuality as well as of literary creativity;⁴ he resembles Satan more than Milton (Sherwin, p. 32); his imagery partakes of the demonic.⁵ Tormented, colorful writer of tormented, colorful verse, he does not much resemble an "eighteenth-century" poet.

Critical allegations of this sort imply a version of literary history (often a Freudified and personalized version) which blurs the century between Milton and Pope, a period that has long caused trouble for critics of poetry. Collins in his most conspicuous recent avatars gains stature mainly by his intimations of the future: a false teleology. The currently fashionable view privileges poetic sensibility, posits discernible relations between psyches and the texts they originate, appropriates Collins to the values of Romanticism. I shall argue that he belongs, rather, to the century of Pope and Johnson, the century in which he lived. (He died in 1759, only fifteen years after Pope.) If, as I believe, Collins inhabits the second rank of eighteenth-century, not nineteenth-century, poets, one must wonder why, unlike such indubitably second-rate contemporaries as Joseph Warton and far more even than Thomas Gray, he has captured the attention of thoughtful and perceptive late-twentieth-century critics who hint that he has the stature of an important Romantic poet or condescend to him because he fails to be sufficiently Romantic.

The new defenders of sublimity, anxiety, and the demonic have acquired their authority partly by sheer intelligence, partly by astute public relations, partly by their ability to perceive enduring human concerns implicit in even the most convention-dominated texts of the past. Their version of Collins sounds worthy of attention because the poet, as they present him, cares about what we care about. Close examination of the critical texts, however, may raise questions about whether the "caring" belongs to Collins or to his recent interpreters.

The most compelling Collins-critics share a Freudian orientation at times startling in its single-minded intensity. Thus Thomas Weiskel, writing about the poet's use of Oedipus in the "Ode to Fear," comments, "It is exactly this ambivalent excitement and dread which the Freudians insist lie behind the mystery of the primal scene and its perceptional derivatives. Had Freud never lived, we would be driven to the hypothesis of the oedipal complex to make sense of these lines" (p. 116). Without Freud, in other words, Collins makes no sense. With Freud's help, critics discover in the poet a consistent substratum of torment. Consider Bloom, also on the "Ode to Fear": "at how high a price Collins purchases this indefinite rapture, this cloudy Sublime! For his poem is one with his deepest repression of his own humanity, and accurately prophesies the terrible pathos of his fate, to make us remember him always, with all his gifts, as Dr. Johnson's 'Poor Collins.'"⁶ Or Sherwin: "Occasionally, as in the 'Ode to Evening,' [numinous or visionary possibilities] threaten to erupt, abandoning Collins to his anxieties, and while the temptation to range beyond even toward daemonic ground is scrupulously resisted, it is never completely subdued. For all its delicacy, Collins' Evening realm, like all of his art, is founded upon an unappeasable terror" (pp. 102-3).

Anxiety, the dominant emotion of the twentieth century, governs, in many of these perceptions, the eighteenth-century poet. We domesticate our forebears by discovering in them our own sufferings. Even Collins's most serene lyric, the "Ode to Evening," testifies to his "terror"; his interest in fear as poetic subject proclaims his uncertainties. Instead of inquiring why the poet concerns himself with the literary dynamics of fear, these critics ask what Collins is afraid of. "Here is Collins, invoking Fear," Bloom writes, "yet what has he to fear except himself and John Milton?" (Anxiety of Influence, p. 110). According to Paul Fry, "Collins's Fear, fear of nothing but his own hobgoblinry, is really anxiety" (p. 132). Sherwin tells us, "Collins' fear is that he doesn't feel, or fear, enough" (p. 77). The line between poetic speaker and living person blurs when Bloom can link an ode's evocation of fear to its author's subsequent insanity or Sherwin make confident assertions about Collins's own fears. The interest of the poetry depends on the possibility of making provocative claims about its author.

These critics concentrate almost entirely on four poems by Collins, and mainly on three of them. Because of its announced subject, "Ode to Fear" lends itself particularly well to exegesis of anxiety; it also exemplifies the "daemonic" side of Collins, which links him most obviously with the Romantics.⁷ "Ode on the Poetical Character" deals explicitly with questions of origins and makes the writing of poetry its poetic subject; critics who associate anxiety with problems of poetic genealogy therefore delight in it. "Ode to Evening" attracts attention by its innovative form and by its clear relations to the poetic past and the poetic future alike. And, for at least some critics, "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland," which also demonstrates its author's awareness of the demonic and his concern with the sources of poetic power, merits close attention. The political odes, addressed to Peace or Liberty or mourning the death of a soldier in battle, are relatively neglected, as are the early eclogues and the odes on "The Manners" and "The Passions." On the whole these works perhaps lack the poetic merit of most of the widely discussed texts, but it is more relevant to point out that they seem less "interesting" than the others—which is to say, less immediately involved with issues that preoccupy twentieth-century readers. At any rate, the version of Collins that emerges from the most conspicuous current discussions depends on severe selectivity. A personification like "Observance" ("To me in Converse sweet impart, / To read in Man the native Heart")⁸ does not lend itself readily to speculation about terror or the demonic.

The critics concern themselves, of course, with accomplishment as well as psychology. "What is at stake [for "Collins, Smart, and the great Romantics"]," Geoffrey Hartman writes, "is, in fact, the erection of a voice" (Fate of Reading, p. 167). The problem of "voice" in Collins has provoked considerable discussion. Fry, concerned with the development of the ode in English, links Collins and Gray as practitioners. "The occasion of the ode is vocative, presentational, yet what it repeats over and over is the dispersion of voice and presence from the text that stands in their place. This is true of all odes, but nowhere more clearly true than in Gray and Collins, who show unexampled daring, if I may, in their willing submission to the conventions of 'vocal' writing" (p. 126). Repetition rather than argument, Fry notes, provides the important "semaphores" of the ode (p. 125); Collins's style depends heavily on generic tradition. Weiskel speaks of the "radical uncertainty of tone which the sublime poem exhibits"; he continues, "The poor 'I,' or voice of these poems, is often thrown into affectation or attitudinizing of one kind or another in its effort to stay afloat on the turbulence of ideological change." The problem of tone that he locates is "how to be at once impassioned, high sounding, and sincere" (p. 109). Noting the "histrionic, sometimes hysterical, character" of Collins's odes, Hartman attributes this character to their evocation of "a power of vision they fear to use"—the problem of voice and tone thus leading back once more to that of fear and anxiety (Beyond Formalism, p. 326). And Sherwin sees Collins as involved in an "ordeal of soul making" which "consists largely of his efforts—under Milton's aegis—to discover a voice that expresses his own individual genius" (pp. 11-12).

Although only Weiskel mentions "uncertainty of tone" as an aspect of Collins's writing, all these critics imply the same thing. In effect they both reiterate and defend against the kind of charge Gray long ago leveled at Collins: "a fine Fancy, model'd upon the Antique, a bad Ear, great Variety of Words, & Images with no Choice at all."⁹ Fine fancy and richness of diction with little control, bad ear, lack of choice in images: such poetic attributes, with their implied indiscriminacy, might generate tonal uncertainty with no need to allege "turbulence of ideological change" as a cause. Collins struggles to find a voice, he falls into hysterical modes, he submits to necessities which he appears not fully to understand. His critics interpret these facts as aspects of his interest for twentieth-century readers.

One possible explanation for the generosity of such interpretations emerges in Sherwin's book-length treatment. "Contra Johnson," Sherwin writes, "it can be argued that dread of the imagination's more-than-rational energy bespeaks too narrow a conception of reason and suggests that it is the rational in us which needs cleansing" (p. 80). The critic offers this as his own insight, not Collins's; indeed, he adds that "Collins … remains a stranger to this saving wisdom" (p. 80). The observation, and its characterization as "saving wisdom," betray the bias that once produced the description of Pope and Dryden as classics of our prose. The forces of "reason" and "imagination" square off once more; Hartman and Bloom and Fry and Weiskel, allying themselves with imagination, claim Collins for the irrational, the suprarational. His uncertainties, like his anxieties, associate him with those who go beyond reason.

The notion of the eighteenth century as an "Age of Prose and Reason" vanished long ago, one might suppose. But when Sherwin writes of "the contagion of the age" (p. 43), he means the century's alleged overvaluing of the rational. "How can the enlightened mind rid itself of itself?" he inquires (p. 43), posing this question as central to Collins's undertaking. Later, he characterizes the poet's techniques in the "Ode to Fear" as "a Dionysiac gesture aimed at abolishing the various Enlightenment constraints prohibiting intercourse between his actual self and the self of his desire" (p. 68). Up-to-date vocabulary, an old-fashioned view. Even Hartman and Bloom, with more apparently complicated understandings of the eighteenth century, sometimes hint at less blatant versions of a similar interpretation. When Hartman writes, of a poetic line extending from Collins to Coleridge by way of Smart, Chatterton, and Blake, "The genius of Poetry becomes a genie once more, a compelling psychic force that works its own salvation in a man, and often as an adversary to accepted values" (Beyond Formalism, p. 325), he implies the superiority of this salvationary poetic force to the "accepted values" it combats, the values of the age. Or when Bloom comments, with an air of large concession, "The inherent values of eighteenth-century personification were undoubtedly very real," one can hardly doubt that he finds "Collins' mythical confrontations" far superior to the "traditional personification" they supplant, because larger, more "imaginative," than such personification could ever be (Visionary Company, p. 8).

If Collins can be made to stand for good imagination as opposed to bad reason, his current critical resurgence becomes more comprehensible. In The Visionary Company Bloom summarizes the "myth" of literary history which Collins accepted; there is reason to believe that Bloom accepts it too:

Collins saw himself as a poet separated by the school of Waller from a main tradition of the English Renaissance, the creation of a British mythology: the Faery Land of Spenser, the green world of Shakespeare's romances, the Biblical and prophetic self-identification of Milton. This reading of English poetic history, with Waller and Pope in the Satanic role, is itself of course a poetic myth, and a very productive one, in Blake and the Romantics as much as in Collins and the Wartons. (p. 11)

Collins's revival by neo-Romantic critics who share this vision of the fruitful poetic line depends on the perception that at least this one eighteenth-century poet participates in the ennobling tradition of Shakespeare and Spenser rather than the enervating one of Pope and Waller.

One recent study of Collins, Richard Wendorf's William Collins and Eighteenth-Century English Poetry, tries to put the poet back where he belongs, among his contemporaries.¹⁰ Wendorf understands Collins as de veloping from a fairly orthodox eighteenth-century position to take gradual possession of an original idiom, technique, and subject. Finally, however, he sees Collins as a poet of limitation.

Collins's is, for better and worse, a poetry of limitation. It would be difficult to think of another poet who has been so successful in emphasizing his own limitations, in suggesting poems that might be written and welcoming powers that might be felt. Collins's most impressive poems are often paradoxical or ambivalent, devoted either to the difficulties involved in achieving poetical success or to certain effects and materials that are considered to lie just beyond this poet's reach. But a poetry that celebrates its own limitations is ultimately constrained by them. I think we sense, especially in Collins's final poem, his own realization that there were certain boundaries beyond which his innovative approach could not be pushed. (p. 188)

This balanced assessment comes as a relief after so much overheated language about terror and the demonic, yet it too may confirm old stereotypes about the eighteenth century. Dr. Johnson made thrilling poetry of man's confrontation with his mortal limits, but Collins's version, in this summary, sounds less than thrilling. A poetry that backs away from its own sense of possibility, a poet aware of Romantic powers and of the unlikelihood of using them, a pervasive realization of boundaries: although Wendorf does not suggest that these aspects of Collins depends on his inhabiting a period in which reason and moderation were highly valued, such a conclusion might tempt any reader. Wendorf s summary reverses the interpretation that finds Collins interesting because he defies the standards of his age; now the poet no longer sounds interesting.

The problem of interpretation which Collins raises, in other words, involves his literary period as well as his literary accomplishment. Understood as a poet struggling to escape the constraints of inhibiting conventions and values, he earns attention by his promise of a glorious future: Wordsworth and Keats achieve the fruition which their predecessor intermittently foretells. This view depends on the critical myth that the Romantic movement defines the great moment of AngloSaxon literary history. Collins and Smart prophesy the coming of nineteenth-century poetic saviors; lyric poetry (including the lyric epic of Wordsworth) epitomizes what all poetry aspires to.

Without discounting the importance of recent critical illuminations of the great Romantics, one yet may observe that other myths can uncover other aspects of past poetry. For those writing in the eighteenth century, obviously, the early nineteenth century does not glimmer in the distance as the approaching era of poetic greatness. Despite their discomfort with aspects of available convention, poets like Collins and Smart write in and from their own time, not only against it. If Collins values Milton and Spenser and Shakespeare, so does Dr. Johnson (although, admittedly, for rather different reasons). Collins's themes in fact often duplicate those explored by contemporaries working in the tradition now understood as "classic" or "Augustan." Lack of clear commitment muffles his voice, but to read his confusions as daring and powerful inflates his reputation at the cost of obscuring the shape of his work. If we understand those confusions as marks of poetic insufficiency—thus returning to an old view of Collins—and see his utterance as analogous to that of quite un-Romantic contemporaries, we may discover different strengths.

First, however, it is worth thinking about why Collins has assumed his current aspect. His poetry provides an ideal text for "creative" criticism, the kind of criticism that inflates its own claims to literary power as well as the stature of its objects. Elements of the verse that fifty years ago provided grounds for critical reproach—dubious syntax, the poet's "mis-remembering" of earlier works, narrative confusion, abrupt shifts of tone, rhetorical vagueness—now increase the opportunities for interpretation; the poetry itself hardly restrains its readers. One can say almost anything about Collins while remaining within the limits of plausibility: a fact that may either unnerve or encourage the would-be critic. Verse that conspicuously fails to declare its own intent allows lavish exercise of critical power.

The poetic vagueness that generates critical freedom especially encourages antirational interpretations. Whatever Collins exemplifies, one could hardly claim him, in his poetic practice, as a proponent of reason. Imagination and originality have since Blake come to seem incontestable poetic virtues—indeed, virtues in life as well as literature. Collins's appeal for the critics and the attraction of their neo-Romantic elucidations depend partly on the seductiveness of such Romantic values. Readers encountering cloudy representations of personalized abstractions can forget the abstractions and discover a mythology by emphasizing the special ("imaginative") rather than the general ("conventional") aspects of such poetic figures. Critical empirebuilding has enlarged Romantic territory until Milton himself appears to inhabit it; such enlargement becomes possible only because imagination and originality have replaced reason and decorum and even moral energy as standards of accomplishment. To value the eighteenth century in its own terms risks the unexciting. Donne and Herbert speak to the twentieth-century reader of familiar spiritual and emotional dilemmas; Wordsworth's suffering and exaltations prefigure other odysseys of the individual soul; but the idea of a struggle for reason and control no longer thrills many readers.

The "Romantic" Collins has obvious appeal for a twentieth-century audience. He resembles us not only in his emotions ("terror," "anxiety," "uncertainty") but in his preoccupations (the nature of the inner life, the nature and possibility of poetry). Neo-Romantic criticism manages often brilliantly to assimilate the past to the present. Nothing any longer seems distant, different; strangeness itself becomes an aspect of familiarity. Critics emphasize how Collins humanizes or demonizes fear or fancy; they thus suppress the problematic and alien aspect of the personified abstractions that may seem to twentieth-century readers even more peculiar than demons. If commentators acknowledge in passing this conventional aspect of Collins's personages, they hasten to emphasize his innovations, his using abstractions in new ways, for new purposes.

Much of Collins's manipulation of characters with names like Fear and Vengeance actually conforms to Johnson's conservative strictures:

To exalt causes into agents, to invest abstract ideas with form, and animate them with activity has always been the right of poetry. But such airy beings are for the most part suffered only to do their natural office, and retire. Thus Fame tells a tale and Victory hovers over a general or perches on a standard; but Fame and Victory can do no more. To give them any real employment or ascribe to them any material agency is to make them allegorical no longer, but to shock the mind by ascribing effects to nonentity.¹¹

Johnson goes on to complain about Milton's Sin and Death: they should not build a bridge, since immaterial agencies cannot cause material effects. Unlike Sin and Death, Collins's character Fear in "The Passions," startled by the sound he himself has made, and the more complexly realized equivalent figure of the "Ode to Fear," both causing and suffering terror, meet Johnson's standards: the actions of the character interpret the abstraction he represents. Collins's strongest personifications convey power beyond their functions of explanation and emphasis, but they do not pass the boundaries of those "traditional values" which Hartman opposes to Collins's.

The best personifications create their effects by evocative physical or emotional detail. Collins's odes, however, also contain beings whose nature receives virtually no specification: "Young Fancy," for example, from "Ode on the Poetical Character," the subject of a good deal of recent discussion. She gives to chosen poets the magic girdle of poetic sanctity; she offers "Visions wild" and a vaguely inspirational "Flame" (22); she retires with the presiding deity of the poem to his sapphire throne; and, along with "Heav'n" (18), she finally overturns the inspiring bowers of the poet's Eden. She has no physical reality, and her functions remain at least partially obscure. In 1797 Laetitia Barbauld said of this mysterious retirement with God that the allegory was "neither luminous nor decent."¹² Subsequent commentators have by and large pursued the question of decency but ignored that of luminosity, which, with its implication of revelatory force as well as of clarity, is in fact an important issue. Mrs. Barbauld presumably means that it is difficult to figure out what happens in the epode of Collins's ode. That difficulty—which in various forms pervades the entire poem—only encourages twentieth-century critical inventiveness. The critics declare their certainty ever more emphatically as they confront Collins's uncertainty. Thus Weiskel, on a single page about the epode (p. 128), uses the locutions "clearly," "of course," "surely," and "pretty clearly," and he concludes, in an impatient outburst, "If this doesn't suggest sexual union I don't know what does." He protests too much: almost nothing in Collins's text is clear or sure or a matter of course, and little seems even "pretty clear." Luminosity, however, no longer implies an accepted critical standard; its opposite, obscurity, attracts far more attention. Obscurity suggests "depth," "complexity"; on the grounds largely of his obscurity, it seems, Collins claims the epithet of "visionary."

Compared with the personifications of his eighteenth-century predecessors and contemporaries, Collins's imagined figures, despite their elaborative detail, rarely manifest the kind of energy one would expect to find associated with terms like "visionary" and "demonic." In the "Ode to Fear," for instance, "Danger" inhabits an unusual setting and is "hideous":

Danger, whose Limbs of Giant Mold
What mortal Eye can fix'd behold?
Who stalks his Round, an hideous Form,
Howling amidst the Midnight Storm,
Or throws him on the ridgy Steep
Of some loose hanging Rock to sleep.
(10-15)

I find him less scary than a more economically rendered group of personifications created by the young Pope in Windsor-Forest:

Gigantick Pride, pale Terror, gloomy Care,
And mad Ambition, shall attend her there:
There purple Vengeance bath'd in Gore retires,
Her Weapons blunted, and extinct her Fires:
There hateful Envy her own Snakes shall feel,
And Persecution mourn her broken Wheel:
There Faction roar, Rebellion bite her Chain,
And gasping Furies thirst for Blood in vain.
(415-22)¹³

Drawing on an established iconographic tradition, Pope adapts it to his immediate poetic needs with brilliant selectivity: Envy stung by her own snakes, Rebellion biting her chain, Faction's roaring converted to an emblem of futility. In contrast, Collins's multiplication of actions sounds shrill, overinsistent. Unlike Pope, he sounds as though he does not quite know what he is doing.

Obscurity and confusion are not poetic virtues. A poet's insistence that his personifications are frightening does not make them so. Collins's determination to populate his odes with abstractions—some of them quite unrealized as poetic beings—does not constitute a triumph of poetic imagination, an escape from the constrictions of his age; on occasion these abstractions (Fancy, for instance) testify to imaginative failure or confusion. On the other hand, Collins has his own more modest virtues. The project he pursues links him with his non-Romantic contemporaries—not only Gray and Smart, concerned like him with the conundrum of what modern poetry can do, but Johnson and Reynolds and Young, concerned like him with the nature and implications of human limits.

The shape of Collins's preoccupations begins to emerge through a closer look at a personification mentioned earlier, Observance, from "The Manners." Collins's poem appeared in his collection of Odes in 1747. Two years later, Samuel Johnson published The Vanity of Human Wishes, which opens,

Let observation with extensive view,
Survey mankind, from China to Peru;
Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife,
And watch the busy scenes of crouded life;
Then say….
(1-5)¹⁴

Collins invokes "Observance" in these terms:

O Thou, who lov'st that ampler Range,
Where Life's wide Prospects round thee change, …
To me in Converse sweet impart,
To read in Man the native Heart,
To learn, where Science sure is found,
From Nature as she lives around….
(21-28)

Although Observance's view proves intensive as well as extensive, his first attributed quality emphasizes his "Range." He looks about as well as within; like Observation, he both sees and says ("Converse sweet"), and he too teaches his invoker, supplying skills rather than knowledge of human experience. Collins's shorter couplets lack the weight and tension of Johnson's, but his reliance on a personification devoid of pictorial reality to distance the speaker from his own concerns and to authorize a project of psychological and social investigation foretells the technique of Johnson's poem. A phrase like "Converse sweet"—utterly un-Johnsonian—reveals that Collins interests himself also in immediate feelings; but he embeds references to emotion in an insistently generalized context.

Unlike The Vanity of Human Wishes, "The Manners" imagines earthly possibilities beyond futility. It imagines rather than discovers them. Despite his invocation of Observance, the speaker (unlike Johnson's persona) observes nothing. He conjures up further personifications: the Manners, uncharacterized; Humour and Wit, evoked mainly through their apparel; finally Nature, the object of another elaborate invocation drawing on many literary references. Nature, whose personified form possesses not even specified gender, provides the alleged source of "Each forceful Thought, each prompted Deed" (72) and, apparently, the origins of feeling as well. The ode concludes with the speaker's expressed desire "To rove thy Scene-full World with Thee!" (78).

Before the end of the poem, in short, Collins moves far from Johnson in his articulated concerns. But only the preoccupation he shares with Johnson, the belief in the value of observation, emerges with clarity. The confusion of the rest, when compared with Johnson's certainty and authority, becomes vivid. The speaker in "The Manners" does not know what he wants most, or even whether he values primarily the human or the literary. His desire to rove a "Scene-full World" seems a pallid substitute for experience. The problem of "scene," which does not exist for Johnson, often preoccupies Collins. "Scene" is a problem, and "self," and the relation of the one to the other. Johnson, still convinced of poetry's didactic function, subordinates self and scene alike to moral purpose. Collins, unable to commit himself to either a didactic or an expressive theory of poetry, remains uncertain also about poetry's appropriate subject matter.

The word Scene occurs crucially in another Collins poem, the "Ode on the Poetical Character," which concludes, after an evocation of Milton's Eden,

Critics have pondered the role of Heaven and Fancy in this resolution. Sherwin, for instance: "The kindred powers of Heaven and Fancy—yet surely not Collins' kindred—have overturned the inspiring bower of Milton's mountain paradise, and he finds himself in a heaven-deserted age in which he must descend to the middle ground of the toiling moderns" (p. 88). Or Fry: "Why should Fancy wish to assist in her own disabling? … [Perhaps because] she is secretly a guardian and not a pioneer of psychological borderlands, a timid sorceress of vocal presence who fears her own calling and finally refuses to invoke beings whose response she dreads. Even the creative imagination itself, Collins must finally admit, screens its own workings from consciousness" (p. 109).

The "heaven-deserted age," "the middle ground of the toiling moderns," even the idea of fancy's "disabling"—these comprise extrapolations from the text. The poem actually says, not that Heaven and Fancy have abandoned the poet, but that they have destroyed or concealed one particular "Scene," exemplified by Eden. Milton lolls beneath a tree in this particular Eden, but the final lines do not affirm that no one can live there now. No one can any longer be inspired by this setting, or no one can view it: the lines state only these equivalent possibilities.

One must ask why Heaven and Fancy have acted thus, and the answer, since the poem itself supplies none, will depend on individual predilection. The possibility of a relatively benign interpretation exists among others. Perhaps Heaven and Fancy have not unaccountably reversed their usual functions; perhaps they have only altered the available sources of poetic inspiration. If the poet can no longer see this particular scene, he must look elsewhere: not to religion (the metaphorical Eden) or to the external world (the literal garden, the "Scene-full World"); possibly to the life within?

The question mark belongs tonally to Collins himself. The "Ode on the Poetical Character" does not resolve its implicit question about the source of contemporary inspiration, nor did Collins ever find a satisfactory answer. Inspiration and subject matter are virtually identical, in the final lines of "Ode on the Poetical Character," and Collins's problems about subject plague him to the end of his career. His apparent inability to commit himself to his intimations of possibility helps to account for the flabbiness of his weakest work. He backs away from what he has to say.

Perhaps poetic unsuccess only seems from outside like lack of courage. Collins may have suffered not failure of daring but failure of perception or of intellect as he explored the problem peculiar to his era, that of the extent and limits of the self's prerogatives. The boundaries of justifiable entitlement presented both a personal and a poetic dilemma. What am "I" allowed to do (roam the scene-full world, attend to my own feelings, concern myself with my country or my friends)? What can I write about? How do my public obligations as poet relate to my private impulses? Do my feelings impede or energize my verse? Wordsworth would write the poetry of the "egotistical sublime"; Collins, true to his moment in history, understood egotism as a difficulty: not something to be suppressed, necessarily, but something to be investigated. Just over half a century after his Odes, the literary world would fully discover the self as subject. We still live with that discovery and its consequences; Collins did not. His poetry asks questions which it provisionally and repetitiously answers; the answers amount to a late-Augustan compromise. The questioning itself generates much of the interest of Collins's poetry.

In the year of Collins's death, Edward Young, an old man, published Conjectures on Original Composition. A decade later, in a series of lectures delivered at the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds insisted on the value of imitation and deprecated the notion of originality. Both men, unlike each other and unlike Collins in all obvious respects, dwell on versions of the question that preoccupies the poet: the rights of the creative self, the value of indulging it. The debate over originality only slightly disguises these issues. To go even farther afield, Fanny Burney's famous "shyness," her concern over what the role of author means to a female, transposes the same questions into a more modest mode; her character Evelina, silent in public, voluble on paper, struggles with similar issues. In another key, Dr. Johnson's musings in The Rambler and his agonized self-appraisals in his prayers and meditations also ponder the proper limits of the self's claims. "Dive deep into thy bosom," Young exhorts,

learn the depth, extent, bias, and full fort of thy mind; contract full intimacy with the stranger within thee; excite and cherish every spark of intellectual light and heat, however smothered under former negligence, or scattered through the dull, dark mass of common thoughts; and collecting them into a body, let thy genius rise (if a genius thou hast) as the sun from chaos.¹⁵

Reynolds, Burney, and Johnson, conscious of dangers in such self-concentration, draw on external systems of authority to bound individual presumption. Artistic tradition, social decorum, and Christian faith provide standards and strategies for judging and controlling the self.

Collins, unwilling to trust the stranger within him, finds that faith, reason, and decorum offer slender support. Lacking the structure of established religious or secular mythologies, he generates his own pantheon, but his relation to actualities beyond himself remains uncomfortable. Much of his poetry consists of fantasy constructions which soothingly obscure literal facts of experience and perception. The "Scene-full World" contains possibilities more distressing than the gallery of florid figures like "Vengeance" ("Ode to Fear," 20), the "Fiend of Nature" ("Ode to Mercy," 15), or "Britannia's Genius" ("stain'd with Blood he strives to tear / Unseemly from his Sea-green Hair / The Wreaths of chearful May" ["Ode, to a Lady on the Death of Colonel Ross," 2, 4-6]). From time to time, the poetry affords a glimpse of what it largely suppresses. Thus, Collins's fourth eclogue, after describing Circassian maids with "Their Eyes' blue languish, and their golden Hair" (56), announces with alarming specificity, "Those Hairs the Tartar's cruel Hand shall rend" (58)—a detail inadequately contained by the eclogue's careful Popean couplets. Such a line suggests why Collins relies so heavily on vagueness.

In the background is the horror of death. Johnson suffered over the idea of being sent to hell and damned everlastingly; Collins returns insistently to death's physical realities. He indeed has something to fear besides Milton and himself. In "Ode, to a Lady on the Death of Colonel Ross," where "ev'ry Sod … wraps the Dead" (41), the poet invokes a typical supporting cast: ghostly dead warriors, personified Freedom lying on the grass ("Her matted Tresses madly spread" [40]), "Imperial Honor's awful Hand" (23), "Aërial Forms" (20). Then he acknowledges the possibility that "These pictur'd Glories" (50) may prove inadequate to soothe the survivor's grief for the dead man: "in Sorrow's distant Eye, / Expos'd and pale thou see'st him lie" (52-53). "Sorrow" sees an exposed corpse, not a set of fantasy figures. In "Ode Occasion'd by the Death of Mr. Thomson," a dead poet inhabits an "Earthy Bed" (21); neither dirges nor the tears of Love and Pity will do him any good, hidden as he is beneath the "cold Turf" (32). In "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland," a "luckless Swain" (104), drowned, becomes "a Pale and breathless Corse" (12), appearing to his sleeping wife with "blue swoln face" (131). (She shudders at the sight [130].) Collins confronts his own difficulty with such physical facts most directly in "Ode, Written in the beginning of the Year 1746," one of his best poems, which juxtaposes the "Mold," "Sod," and "Clay" of the dead soldiers with another troop of fanciful personages (Spring, Honour, Freedom, "Fairy Hands," "Forms unseen") to declare the superiority of truth, even the truth of death, over fancy. When Spring returns to deck the graves, the poem alleges, "She there shall dress a sweeter Sod, / Than Fancy's Feet have ever trod" (5-6). Yet the second stanza, a series of personifications, dramatizes the need for fancy as the only defense against death. Like many of Collins's poems, this one struggles with its own indeterminate subject, to declare both the value of truth and the poet's compulsion to decorate intolerable fact with created figures.

The implications of this short poem summarize important aspects of Collins's theme. The feeling self, facing the fact of death, can do nothing. The poetic self can invent, decorate, imagine, create; as a result, it distances painful reality. Dirges, like tears, do not help the dead, but they support survivors. Poems make pictures providing alternatives for fact. Poetry, in other words, does not imitate life, but neither does it openly express the feelings of the poet. It finds appropriate modes of disguise; its remoteness from external reality gives it value.

Read in the context of such a poetic program, the "Ode to Fear" assumes a rather different aspect. Full of "hobgoblinry," to appropriate Fry's term, it makes a point of its own factitiousness. As the opening lines insist, Fancy generates fear, which responds to "th' unreal Scene" (Collins's favorite kind of scene after all) only when Fancy lifts the veil obscuring it (3-4). The speaker's identification with his own personification ("Like Thee I start, like Thee disorder'd fly" [8]) consists mainly in his shared ability to create by fancy the unreal scene and then to respond to it. But Fancy also generates real emotional dangers: the threat of captivation by one's own fantasies ("Who, Fear, this ghastly Train can see, / And look not madly wild, like Thee?" [24-25]). The Greek tragic dramatists suggest a safe way of enjoying such emotion: through the role of reader, in which one can experience without penalty the "throbbing Heart" (42) of terror. The antistrophe, however, acknowledges that the world contains real causes for fear: rape, murder, the cries of drowning seamen—a sinister and disturbing set of evocations. With renewed ardency, therefore, an ardency of submission, the speaker returns to the position of reader, which alone protects him from an emotional reality he dreads. He will suspend disbelief in "each strange Tale" (57) he encounters, and he will avoid testing the authenticity of fearful legend. He begs Fear to teach him to "feel" like Shakespeare (69), able to imagine himself embracing at least this safely mediated form of terror, again the product of Fancy.

The "plot" of this poem resembles that of "Ode, Written in the beginning of the Year 1746" in its opposition between intolerable actuality—rape, murder, and the like—and necessary fancy. But fancy's necessity for Collins bears little relation to its urgency for Coleridge or Keats. Fancy implies a retreat from the "Scene-full World" which Collins desires but can neither inhabit nor interpret; "th' unreal Scene," more controllable, is thus safer.

"Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland," Collins's last poem, which he did not complete, adumbrates a solution to the problem of self and scene: an Augustan reconciliation. Exploring what the speaker calls "Scenes that oer my soul prevail" (204), it uses imagination as a substitute for possibly threatening experience. The poet conjures up the landscape and legendry that engender excitement; he in effect "gives" the scene to his Scottish friend John Home, to whom it belongs by a right Collins cannot himself assert. He thus disclaims the imaginative possession that he demonstrates, adapting a strategy of disguise and defense comparable to that in the "Ode to Fear." The rhetorical framework of the later poem, however, conveys new assurance. "Popular Superstitions" begins and ends with discussions not of legend but of friendship. Home, returning to Scotland, is urged not to forget "that cordial Youth" (5) whom he and Collins have known, and not to forget the "social Name" of the poet himself (10): "But think far-off how on the Southern coast / I met thy Friendship with an equal Flame!" (11-12). (The competitive note just hinted at here—"I'm as friendly as you are"—perhaps foretells the speaker's appropriation of his friend's subject.) The emotional bond between the two men justifies the Englishman in prescribing Home's itinerary and interests. More important, by the ode's end it has generated the speaker's authority. Some day he too may roam the glens and heaths of Scotland. "Mean time," he invokes the "Pow'rs" (215) of that realm to protect his friend: "To Him I lose, your kind protection lend / And touch'd with Love, like Mine, preserve my Absent Friend" (218-19; my italics). His own love has become the talisman, source and symbol of magic preservation; instead of yearning to participate in the energy of mysterious "Pow'rs," he invites them to partake of his own emotional vitality.

Like the group of conventional personifications ("Fancy, Friendship, Science, rose-lip'd Health") that appear unexpectedly at the end of "Ode to Evening" (50), this allusion to the social context returns the poem to safe eighteenth-century ground. But it also returns the speaker to feelings he can boldly claim. Agreeable emotions of friendship, which sanctioned the poetic enterprise in the first place, promise stability of relationship. (Even in Home's absence, the friendship endures; indeed, it seems to strengthen in the course of the poet's musings on his friend's travels.) Providing a point of return from the more troubling feelings evoked by the thought of drowned countrymen or buried kings, the speaker's love for his friend, something within him that he can trust, authorizes his imaginative excursions through the scenefull world and guarantees his safe return. Pope ended his Essay on Man with the vision that "true SELF-LOVE and SOCIAL are the same" (396). Collins resolves his perplexity about what kind of freedom he can allow himself as poet by dissolving his solitary self into a social self—a social name, verbal equivalent for a self. His alliance with Home provides an organizing center, a point of view to clarify the purpose of imaginative wandering; it reduces the problem of subject and the problem of self by generating a focus that justifies the poet's fanciful exploring of the Highlands and alleviates the danger of self-absorption. He can at least imagine dealing with the real—the actual Highlands landscape—without dwelling only on death. Deprived of Eden, the poet can also look within, reveal his feelings about that landscape—as long as he assures himself of his continuing connection with another, his anchor in the world without. The presence of Friendship among the "Ode to Evening" personifications gives it equivalent importance to Fancy; the "Popular Superstitions" ode clarifies that importance. Friendship too is a generative force.

In comparison with the flamboyant distress of a soul grappling with the demonic, the resolution of poems and of problems through reliance on calm friendship sounds unexciting. But some of Collins's best poems, in my view, indeed achieve this sort of stasis: "Ode, Written in the beginning of the Year 1746," "Ode to Evening," "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland." This is the "eighteenth-century Collins": a quieter figure than the Romantic poet to whom we have become accustomed—and, on occasion, a better poet.

I read Collins's poems as a series of questions about the possibility of self-authorization. Aware that the poetic resources of both Milton and Shakespeare have vanished, and finding religious faith inaccessible (his dead inhabit the cold earth, not heaven), Collins discovers little outside himself to value securely. His contemporaries speculate about comparable problems, but locate solutions in various kinds of communal authority: religion (Johnson combating the horror of death and the dangers of the ego, Smart identifying himself with the heroes of his mythology) or social tradition (Churchill, Goldsmith). "Poor Collins" rarely succeeds in his search. Eden lost, the scene-full world posited but rarely discovered, he tries to convert his inner life to the kind of generalization that might substitute for external sanctions without making excessive claims for the self; he reveals the problematics of self as subject. His personifications of emotion (Pity, Fear, the Passions, Mercy, etc.) distance him from his own feeling by claiming its universality (not my pity, mankind's), although the poems in which he embeds these figures insistently, often confusedly, examine his own relation to such generalizations. His resort to social feeling at the end of the "Superstitions" ode involves another kind of externalization, possibly more successful because less desperate. The poetic self, Collins repeatedly concludes, dares do nothing alone. It must submit—to Shakespeare, to the subject matter belonging to a Scot, to the generalizations of the culture. Thus mediated, thus protected, it may generate poetry.

Like Johnson, Collins intermittently suspects that all predominance of imagination over reason is a degree of insanity. Many of his poems are more interesting to talk about than to read because of their uncontrolled imaginative explosions: in summary the poems sound visionary and exciting, but they do not compose any coherent poetic fabric. (The "Ode on the Poetical Character" is a conspicuous case in point.) The criticism that glorifies such writing for its intimations of a new sensibility—minimizing its incoherence and constantly deflected purpose, or attributing them to the bad influence of eighteenth-century rationality—ignores Collins's occasional true, modest achievement: a verse of quiet, faintly melancholy compromise.

Notes

¹Precious Bane: Collins and the Miltonic Legacy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), p. 51.

²The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, rev. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), p. 14.

³ Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 167.

⁴ Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), e.g., pp. 116, 118, 132; Paul H. Fry, The Poet's Calling in the English Ode (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 103.

⁵ Geoffrey H. Hartman, Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays, 1958-1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 325, 331; Weiskel, p. 132; Sherwin, e.g., pp. 57, 67, 103; Fry, pp. 124-25.

⁶The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 111.

⁷ Cf. Hartman: "For Wordsworth personification may be trivial, but it is not innocent. Collins had restored the psychological and ritual link between it and the demonic persona" (Beyond Formalism, p. 331).

⁸ "The Manners. An Ode," lines 25-26, in The Works of William Collins, ed. Richard Wendorf and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). Subsequent quotations from Collins are taken from this edition.

⁹ Gray to Thomas Wharton, 27 December 1746, Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), I, 261.

¹⁰ Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981.

¹¹Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), I, 185.

¹²The Poetical Works of William Collins, with a prefatory essay by Mrs. Laetitia Barbauld (London, 1797), p. xxiii.

¹³Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams, Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961).

¹⁴The Poems of Samuel Johnson, ed. David Nichol Smith and Edward L. McAdam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941).

¹⁵Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition, ed. Edith J. Morley (London: Longmans, Green, 1918), p. 24.