William Collins Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on William Collins

William Collins had his first poem published when he was seventeen, his first book at twenty, his major volume a few days before turning twenty-five, and seems to have stopped writing poetry altogether by the time he was twenty-eight. For more than two centuries Collins has been praised as a poet of limited greatness. While critics have differed over the proportions, most have agreed with Samuel Johnson in seeing in Collins moments of "sublimity and splendor" and at the same time evidence of a mind "obstructed," by fragility of temperament or by the supposed hostility of his era to his gifts. His status has wavered between that of the "minor" and "major" poet. His modern biographer has called him "a minor poet, though first perhaps, among the minor poets who abounded between the age of [John] Dryden and the age of [William] Wordsworth." If some recent critics have regarded Collins as "major," William Hazlitt's judgment of 1818 still catches the usual emphasis on Collins's promise: "He is the only one of the minor poets of whom, if he had lived, it cannot be said that he might not have done the greatest things.

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