William Collins

William Collins 1721-59, English poet. He was one of the great lyricists of the 18th cent. While he was still at Oxford he published Persian Ecologues (1742), which was written when he was 17. Unstable and weak-willed, he never chose a profession and was constantly in debt until he inherited money from an uncle. He won no popularity during his lifetime, and his career was curtailed by insanity. A precursor of the 19th-century romantics, Collins wrote exquisite verse that emphasized mood and imagination. Among his best odes are "To Evening," "To Simplicity," and the one beginning "How sleep the brave."

Bibliography: See biographies by P. L. Carver (1967) and H. W. Garrod (1928, repr. 1973); study by O. Doughty (1964).

Collins, William, in J. Austen's Pride and Prejudice, a pompous and self-satisfied young clergyman. The fulsome letter of thanks that he addressed to Mr Bennet (ch. xxiii, though the text is not given) after his stay with the family has led to his name being colloquially associated with such ‘bread-and-butter’ letters.

Collins, William (1721–59), published his Persian Eclogues (1742) while an undergraduate at Oxford. His Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1746, dated 1747) was to have considerable influence; the volume includes his well-known ‘Ode to Evening’ and ‘How sleep the Brave’, and odes to Pity, Fear, Simplicity, and other abstractions. (See ode.) The last work published in his lifetime was an ode on the death of Thomson (1749), and in 1750 he presented an unfinished draft of his Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands (published 1788) to J. Home. Thereafter he suffered increasingly from severe melancholia, and died in Chichester. Johnson in his Lives of the English Poets commented on his wildness and extravagance, which produced harshness and obscurity as well as ‘sublimity and splendour’, but later poets responded more eagerly to his lyrical intensity and to his conception of poetry as visionary and sacred (see sublime); with Gray he was one of the dominant influences of the later 18th cent.