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

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.

In the essay below, Spacks contends that critics are mistaken in classifying Collins as a Romantic poet; rather, she argues, he should be considered a secondrank eighteenth-century poet.

In the essay below, Finch argues that the sense of emptiness in Collins's odes stems from the poet's concept of immediacy and the inadequacy of language.

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.

In the essay below, McKillop discusses the importance of Collins's work to the Romantic movement.

In the excerpt below, Brown compares Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" with Collins's "Ode to Evening."

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."

In the following essay, Ainsworth considers Collins's influence on William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey.

Below, Bloom analyzes Collins's "Ode on the Poetical Character" and places Collins's technique within the context of the works of Keats, William Blake, Wordsworth, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton.