SOURCE: An introduction to The Poems of William Collins, Ginn & Company, 1898, pp. xi-lxiv.

In the following essay, Bronson argues that Collins foreshadowed the Romantic movement and shares more with such later poets as John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley than with his contemporaries Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson.

… Collins's fame was slow in coming, partly because he outran the literary taste of his age. He was a pioneer in Romanticism, and the public and the critics were not yet ready for Romanticism. Collins was a romanticist by nature, in temperament and type of mind ranging rather with Shelley and Keats than with Addison, Pope, or Johnson. But he was not wholly a romanticist; elements of a true Classicism were deep within him. And he fell upon times in which a pseudo-classical ideal predominated. The history of his poetic development is the resultant of the three forces indicated, of...