SOURCE: "Collins's Ode to Evening—Background and Structure," in Tennessee Studies in Literature, Vol. V, 1960, pp. 73-84.

In the following essay, McKillop discusses the significance of the works of earlier poets and of Collins's own earlier work to his "Ode to Evening."

One of the earliest critical references to Collins's Ode to Evening is to be found in some "Observations on Poetry and Painting" in the Universal Magazine for January 1758:

Few studious minds are unaffected with reading the representations of nature in a rural evening scene; especially if the artist has blended with the truth of imitation that undefineable delicacy of taste, to which even truth herself is often indebted for a more agreeable admittance into the heart. That succinct picture of the setting sun, in the 8th book of the Iliad.

 Now deep in ocean sunk the lamp of light,
Drawing behind the cloudy veil of night...