SOURCE: "The Eighteenth-Century Collins," in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 1, March, 1983, pp. 3-22.

In the following essay, Spacks argues for a less-Romantic, rational view of the poetry of William Collins (1721-1759), whose central emotions and preoccupations—namely anxiety and the demonic—have led to his increased reputation among late twentieth-century critics.

William Collins sounds different now from the Collins we used to know. For example, Paul S. Sherwin claims, "Collins feels, all right; but what he feels most urgently is his estrangement from the passionate integrity of unself-conscious or 'unmixed' feeling. Impatient and aching, he is a fever of himself, his intensity springing directly from baffled desire."¹ This feverish figure, "one of the doomed poets of an Age of Sensibility," to use Harold Bloom's words,² reveals, like Smart and "the great Romantics," a "struggle with his vocation," the fate of the post-Miltonic writer.³ He explores problems of sexuality...