Immediacy in the Odes of William Collins

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, 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, Romanticism of 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, 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, Theme of Collins's Odes, Notes and Queries, 9 October 1943, pp. 214-17, and 23 October 1943, pp. 253-55; and Richard Quintana, 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, Inherent Values of EighteenthCentury Personification, PMLA, 65 (1950), pp. 435-63; and Rachel Trickett

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