author
William Collins
1721–1759
A gifted 18th-century lyric poet, he wrote odes whose feeling and musical language helped point English poetry toward Romanticism. Though his career was brief, his work has long been admired for its imagination, melancholy, and polish.
1 Audiobook
The Poetical Works of William Collins; With a Memoir
by William Collins
About the author
Born in Chichester on December 25, 1721, he was educated at Winchester College and later studied at Magdalen College, Oxford. He published relatively little, but his reputation rests on a small group of finely made poems, especially the Odes of the 1740s, which blend classical form with a more emotional, visionary style.
Readers often place him in the transition between the Augustan age and the coming Romantic movement. His poetry is known for its musical phrasing, personified ideas, and deep feeling, and he is frequently mentioned alongside Thomas Gray as one of the strongest English lyric poets of the mid-18th century.
His life was troubled by financial difficulty and periods of severe mental illness, and he died in Chichester on June 12, 1759. Even so, his best poems continued to grow in stature after his death, and he is now remembered as an important early voice in the shift toward a more inward and expressive kind of English poetry.