SOURCE: An introduction to Moralized Song: The Character of Augustan Lyricism, Rutgers University Press, 1989, pp. 1-51.

In the following essay, Feingold examines some characteristics of Augustan poetry and compares the work of several poets, including Collins.

My subject here is the representation of inwardness in certain writings, usually poems, which, though they differ considerably from one another, still stand forth as easily recognizable documents of Augustan literary culture. My interest is in the writer's double effort to represent the experience of inwardness and at the same time speak to an audience imagined as present to him. This dual project is characteristic of Augustan literature and particularly of Augustan poetry: what it marks is the writer's insistent interest in the intersection of social and inward experience, an interest he reveals in his articulated and enacted wish to be seen as speaking with public authority even at the represented moment...