The Ordering of Vision in Collins's"Ode on the Poetical Character"

HEIDI VAN DE VEIRE

The poem of the mind in the act of findingWhat will suffice. It has not always hadTo find: the scene was set; it repeated whatWas in the script.

Wallace Stevens

In his account of Richard Savage, Samuel Johnson helped to authorizewhat has been a staple of literary biography to this day—the writer as greatsufferer; and although only a few pages long by comparison, his life ofWilliam Collins also emphasizes the distressed poet: "Collins, who, whilehe 'studied to live,' felt no evil but poverty, no sooner 'lived to study' thanhis life was assailed by more dreadful calamities, disease and insanity."'So embedded is this image of the distressed poet that most twentieth-century interpretations assume at the outset that "Poor dear Collins" gaveutterance to a frenzied mind and that his ostensibly most autobiographicallyric, "Ode on the Poetical Character," attests to a deep sense of failureas a writer born before his time. When a poet loses self-assurance, theargument goes, he turns to the subject of writing about composition; hence,' 'the prevalence of poetry as a theme, and the pessimistic view of his ownpoetic age, reveal both Collins's preoccupation with and lack of confidencein his own poetic role."^ Such previous commentators as Northrop Frye,A.S.P. Woodhouse, Earl Wasserman, Patricia Spacks, and GeoffreyHartman have attributed Collins's alleged sense of failure to his personalweakness or to his deep awareness of his "laggard age." Although morerecent interpretations of "Poetical Character" by Paul Fry, Stuart Curran,Janice Haney-Peritz, and Casey Finch have clearly moved away fromunqualified pessimism, much still needs to be done on the parodic aspectsof this poem.3

Notwithstanding the impression given in "Poetical Character" of ahumble speaker admiring past literary achievement and despairing overhis own meager talents, this ode is de facto proof against any notion ofan uninspired writer floundering about for words and may even be takenas a rhetorical imposture, a defensive stance like Swift's false modesty in"Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift," to undermine the reader's criticism

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by anticipating it: "In Pope, I cannot read a line,/ But with a sigh, I wishit mine." In an acute analysis of Swift's tone in his autobiographical poems,Claude J. Rawson remarks that this satirist had problems talking abouthimself and that parody was his best defense. Richard Wendorf is the onlyreader, I believe, who has fully recognized the deliberately elusive andparodic quality of Collins's narrator in "Poetical Character": "Critics appearto have missed or to have discounted much of Collins's linguisticplayfulness in the ode, his serious jesting."*

Related to Collins's own unstable personal life, a more general causeof the alleged pessimism in "Poetical Character" is presumably the wholeethos beginning already in the 1740s, as described by Fredric V. Bogel:

English writers in the Age of Sensibility were, to a surprising degree, unitedby a perception of the impoverishment or insubstantiality of their experienceand by their effort both to register and to resist that insubstantiality. In thecourse of that effort they managed to alter the very terms in which they hadassessed their experience and thus to construct a paradigm of valuation capableof disclosing significance and value in the forms of their impoverishment.'

What is important is not merely that Collins perceived the"impoverishment" of experience but that he found the means of using itas a subject for his great ode. It is his narrative strategy of presenting himseKas a creative reader rather than as poetic genius that qualifies, and evenobviates, the despair usually attributed to Collins's tone. Like his friendsthe Wartons, Collins believed strongly that the Elizabethan was the goldenage of English poetry and that the reader in his own enlightened era wastoo sophisticated to respond wholly to the allegorical, "Gothic" inventionsof the past. But despite the inevitable separation of the Augustan mind fromprimitive genius, by a momentary surrender to "Divine Emotions" likefear, one may "read the Visions old" and "Hold each strange Tale devoutlytrue."^ In his cogent interpretation of Thomas Warton's mourning the lossof the medieval past in his History of English Poetry, Lawrence Lipkingidentifies what I take to be the same fiction in Collins's poem: "He [Warton]grieves not for a historical moment, but for a visionary prehistory in whichtruth was veiled by illusion, and in which all men lived his kind of poetry.From a middle ages made all of fancy, he wakes with regret to a renaissanceof reality. It is the dialectic itself that has enchanted him."^ Collins'sspeaker, I am arguing, dramatizes the ideal reader as a literary historianand a would-be poet—as a Warton. It is worth stressing here that Collinshimself had projected The History of the Revival of Learning, erroneouslyadvertised as "published" already in 1744 but never completed, thoughto his final days an obsessive idea.*

To judge by previous commentary, the term "poetical character" itselfremains ambiguous. Is Collins addressing what is definitive to poetry perse as opposed to prose? Is he trying to define the characteristics of the poet'smind as maker? Or is he more vaguely referring to the whole enterpriseof bringing forth the poetic text, a process involving finally the reader'sresponses? Although these meanings may not be mutually exclusive, theydo initiate different expectations and approaches in apprehending the poemat hand.

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The whole question of character is problematic, of course, and PaulKorshin has related it to the eighteenth century's interest in predictability.Korshin deals mainly with novels and drama, but his definition can beapplied as well to "Ode on the Poetical Character." Since the poetical"character" has been removed from our view, it is up to the reader topredict its essential qualities. Moreover, even the "character" of the personais in doubt while disavowing interpretive authority ("if. . .1 read aright,""trembling feet," and the like). Hence, the reader of the ode has to"construct" the "character" of the speaker, who in turn is trying to callforth the "poetical" character.' Thus without ruling out other connotations,I shall emphasize "poetical character" as the product of the speaker'sordering activity, namely the process of reading. Instead of assuming thetext as an objectively fixed framework, Collins's poem renders the speaker'smind as a reifying agent; hence, the creative involvement in generatingthe poetic character scarcely results in the gloomy defeatism often attributedto him.

To invoke the "sister arts," one way of approaching this ode is toconsider its structure as a triptych: the strophe, or first side panel, depictsthe speaker's reading of Spenser; the antistrophe, or second side panel,concerns the reading of Milton; and the epode, or centerpiece, invokes"Fairy Legends" to trace the genesis of the band. The speaker's own"painting" of the poetical character, the epode, is ensconced between thetwo side panels of the triptych, his archetypal experience of reading Spenserand Milton, respectively. Although the "poetical character" is an elusiveprocess, a performance in time, Collins alludes to a non-temporal ar t -painting—to posit the act of reading in a concrete setting and thus tocompensate for the "awareness of insubstantiality" that Bogel attributesto writers in the later eighteenth century.

Already in his own time, Collins's notorious opaqueness of phraseappeared to be a sign of mental instability, as Johnson complained:

He [Collins] had employed his mind chiefly upon works of fiction and subjectsof fancy, and by indulging some peculiar habits of thought was eminentlydelighted with those flights of imagination which pass the bounds erf nature. . . .His poems are the productions of a mind not deficient in fire, nor unfurnishedwith knowledge either of books or life, but somewhat obstructed in its progressby deviation in quest of mistaken beauties.'"

We do not know exactly how Johnson understood the "Ode on the PoeticalCharacter," but from these remarks it seems clear that he had no patiencewith Collins's "meanders of enchantment." By contrast, perhaps notsurprisingly, Coleridge admired the "peculiar habits of thought" in thispoem and acknowledged their effect on him:

Poetry, though treating on lofty & abstract truths, ought to be deemedimpassioned by him, who reads it with impassioned feelings.—Now Collins'Ode on the poetical character—that part of it, I should say beginning with—'The Band (as faery Legends says) Was Wove on that creating Day,' has inspired& whirled me along with greater agitations of enthusiasm tiian any of the mostimpassioned Scene in Schiller or Shak^eare using 'impassioned' in it's confinedsense for writing in which the human passions of Pity, Fear, Anger, Revenge,

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Jealousy or Love are brought into view with their workings.—Yet I considerthe latter poetry as more valuable, because it gives more general pleasure—&I judge of all things by their Utility."

Coleridge's self-correction at the end of the passage niinimalizes thecreativity of the reader as well as the importance of raw emotion. The"agitations of enthusiasm" prompted by his reading of Collins's ode arefar removed from Johnson's distrust towards "the quest of mistakenbeauties" ascribed to the ode; and the differences between these tworeaders can be partly reconciled in Mrs. Barbauld's statement on Collins'suse of personification:

In his endeavors to embody the fleeting forms of mind, and clothe them withcorrespondent imagery, he [Collins] is not unfrequently obscure; but even whenobscure, the reader who possesses congenial feelings is not ill pleased to findhis faculties put upon the stretch in the search of those sublime ideas whichare apt, from their shadowy nature, to elude the grasp of the mind."

Just as Collins's subject concerns the difficulty of reincarnating the poetryof an earlier culture, so his nervous style embodies ' 'the fleeting forms ofmind"; and even his obscurity has the function of eliciting the reader'sactive participation in the aesthetic work. Hence, instead of stressing thepoem as product, Mrs. Barbauld focuses mainly on the process of readerlyenactment.

The "Ode on the Poetical Character" immediately introduces thespeaker as a reader: "As once, if not with light Regard/1 read aright thatgifted Bard" (11. 1-2). At an apparently random yet indelible moment, thespeaker has been reading Spenser with careful attention ("As once" andthe litotes "if not with light Regard"). Since the conditional "if" appliesto "I read aright," it allows the possibility of misreading Spenser—a distinctpossibility, according to Joseph Spence, who argues in Polymetis (1747) thatSpenser's Faerie Queene is a bad instance of the modems as opposed to"the ancients [who] used signs with far more probability." Spenser'smultiplicity, "a condition in which too many signs are pointing in too manydifferent directions, not only foils correct reading but constitutes a failureto elaborate the allegory with probable circumstances so serious as todestroy the unity of the work."" Although critical of this writer's profusionof meaning, Collins also praises him as the "gifted Bard" and parentheticallydescribes Spenser's school as "blest" by "His Loveliest Elfin Queen" (11. 3-4).

Now that Collins's speaker has been introduced as a reader, the poemmoves to the interpretation of Spenser's poetry: "One, only One, unrival'dFair,/ Might hope the magic Girdle wear" (11. 5-6). Like the souls condemnedin Dante's Inferno, the unworthy aspirants are beyond hope of everpossessing the divine gift of poetry: "Some chaste and Angel-Friend toVirgin-Fame" appears to be protecting Florimel's girdle from any "loath'ddishonour'd Side" (11. 11, 13). In turning attention to the losers of thetournament, however, the speaker digresses from Spenser's originalallegorical purpose to sympathize with the "hopeless Fair" who have beensmitten with the endeavor to possess the magical band and thus prefigureshis own position in the antistrophe when trying to assimilate Milton's"Glory":

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Thither oft his Glory greeting.From Wafer's Myrtle Shades retreating.

With many a Vow from Hope's aspiring Tongue,My trembling Feet his guiding Steps pursue;

In vain—(11. 68-72)

As a writer in the eighteenth century, self-consciously distant from themedieval and Renaissance imagination, Collins represents both the plightof being denied "The Cest of amplest Pow'r" and the vicarious revival ofthis poetical character through the archetypal "Divine Emotions" celebratedin the "Ode to Fear."

The introduction of Fancy in lines 17-22 complements the speaker'slesson from reading Spenser—the discovery of being "Happier hopeless."Since Fancy's bestowal of the magic girdle is an acte gratuite, pursuit beingvain from the outset, most significant to the would-be poet and reader arethe inherent qualities of receptivity. Like the saved among the Christianfaithful at the Last Judgment, the worthy few have "blest, prophetic Loins"and are therefore predestined to receive the gift. Empowered by thisengirding, they will be able to divine Fancy's ministry in all her primordialviolence—to "gaze her Visions wild, and feel unmix'd her Flame!" (11.21-22). A remarkable instance of Collins's "obscurity,"the unidiomatictransitive form of "gaze" here stresses the inspired reader's power to enactthe poetic character.'*

By reading Spenser's allegory to the effect that it is better to be withouthope rather than to pine for what is not, the speaker compares his ownfate in the antistrophe:

In vain—Such Bliss to One alone.Of all the Sons of Soul was known.And Heav'n, and Fancy, kindred Pow'rs,Have now o'erturn'd th'inspiring Bow'rs,

Or curtain'd close such Scene from ev'ry future View.(U. 72-76)

Once recognizing in his futile pursuit that the "Bliss" of the "God-like Gift"has been the exclusive prerogative of Milton, the speaker knows that heis "continually separated from those powers he wishes would possesshim." 15 As a creative reader, however, he actively participates not onlyin constituting the poetic text but also in articulating his feelings as a merespectator kept at a safe distance from sublimity. Hence, the strophe hasintroduced us to three main aspects of the speaker's reading process: (1)his self-portrayal as a resourceful interpreter of Spenser; (2) his particular,footnoted [with its slight error of reference] reading of Spenser's accountof the Band; and (3) his consoling thought that it is happier to be hopelessthan to embark on quixotic quests for magical powers almost irretrievablylost to the eighteenth-century writer.

This readerly encounter with Spenser gives rise to the ultimate subjectof his ode—the apotheosis of Milton, accompanied by the speaker's meekacknowledgement of vainly pursuing with "trembling Feet" the poeticgenius's "guiding Steps." Milton's position "high on some Cliff" (1. 55)

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parallels the position of the "magic Girdle" itself in Spenser's text, "hungon high" (1. 7). To invoke again the comparison of this ode to a paintedtriptych: on the first side panel, we see the contestants engaged in fruitlesscompetition for the prize; on the second side panel, the analogouspresentation of the speaker himself straining for a full assimilation ofMilton's "Glory."

Although at the beginning the speaker is tentative about hisinterpretation of Spenser, in the epode he shirks the private task of assigningmeaning and relies instead on traditional folklore: "as Fairy Legends say"(1. 23). Both the public nature and indeterminacy of "Fairy Legends"contribute to the speaker's self-effacing tactic: the interpretation of folktalesis a community activity with the narrator as merely the keeper and voiceof a culture's beliefs. Like the Ossian poet on the horizon, Collins acts asa lonely shaman for an Enlightenment audience, recalling the romanticpast for an epoch not only aware, but even proud of, its distance from thePierian spring. "As knowledge and learning encrease," Warton observes,"poetry begins to deal less in imagination: and these fantastic beings giveway to real manners and living characters.""

This sense of the present gained from contemplating the demise of themythopoeic imagination appears in the very middle of the epode, whichis also the middle of the entire poem: "And Thou, Thou rich-hair'd Youthof Morn,/ And all thy subject Life was bom!" (11. 39-40). In his readingof the "Fairy Legends," the speaker reconstructs a mythical past, a goldenera in which Apollo—the archetypal "poetical character"—and all his"subject Life"—poetry—were bom. The address to Apollo in the middleof the poem is the only action In the present; and it is logically the focusof the triptych's centerpiece, the ultimate expression of the speaker'sconstructive reading of the poetical character, i' The two side panels of thetriptych, signifying Spenser and Milton as examples of past bards, can beopened or closed at will; thus whenever convenient they may reveal orhide the ideal, mythical expression of the poetical character—Apollo andhis "subject Life," deriving from fairy legends. This framing deviceencapsulates Collins's ambiguous purpose in general: at one moment hewants to be possessed by the divine inflatus of poetry; at another, whilemindful that pursuit of creative power is hopeless, he indulges in thefreedom of standing outside the art work and interpreting it for his owntime.

The overall structure of the epode, the arrangement of the birth andattendant characters around the central Apollo, reinforces the process ofreading as a challenge to our prescribed readerly expectations. Apollo'sbirth occurs from "out the veiling Cloud" (1. 37) as the result of the unionbetween god and fancy; the "veiling Cloud" prevents the spectator fromwitnessing the whole affair. Just as the two side panels of the triptych mayclose off the center, so "Heav'n, and Fancy, kindred Pow'rs,/ Have nowo'erturn'd th'inspiring Bow'rs,/ Or curtain'd close such Scene from ev'ryfuture View" (11. 74-76; my emphasis). Just as "Heaven" and "Fancy" havedrawn the curtain over the scene of poetry, so the actual engendering ofthe poetical character remains hidden and mysterious. In the second

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grammatical sentence of the epode, lines 41-50, personifications ofpsychological states involved in reading, including those "dang'rousPassions" hostile to the process, denote the birth pains. But conflict isessential to mimesis. For instance, though fear, anger, despair, and revengemay threaten Music's harmony in "The Passions," yet, by being held intension with the key tonality, they contribute to the general structure. Thusthe speaker's fear of heights while attempting to reach Milton's altitudecauses his "trembling feet"; but rather than signifying cowardice orhysteria, his emotion testifies to the vicarious experience of the poet'ssublime vision.

Counterbalanced against the "dangerous Passions" are "Wonder" and"Truth": "But near is sate Ecstatic Wonder,/ List'ning the deep applaudingThunder:/ And Truth, in sunny Vest array'd,/ By whose the Tarsel's Eyeswere made" (11. 43-46; my emphasis in bold type). Collins poses here theideal equilibrium between invention and judgment, the symbiosis describedby Pope:

The gen'rous Critick fann'd the Poet's Fire,And taught the World, with Reason to Admire.Then Criticism the Muse's Handmaid prov'd.To dress her Charms, and make her more belov'd."

Collins, however, gives this double function a new twist in the speaker'sdilemma throughout "Poetical Character": to attain the transcendence ofpoetic truth, the mind has to be open to wonder; but at the lesser and moreusual moments of creative energy, the mind has to find something to do,namely, to read historically, conscious of the alien spirit from the past.

In "Poetical Character," Truth, resplendent with light, is compared tothe hawk's keen vision, an ocular image recalling the section on Spenser,where the girdle is the "Wish of each love-darting Eye" (1. 8; my emphasis).Besides visual sharpness, however, the reading process requires "EcstaticWonder," a capacity to respond vividly through the senses, as the auralassociations indicate, again with an unidiomatic transitive form of the verbto stress the creative will over nature: "List'ning the deep applaudingThunder." "Wonder" is thus linked with those "few" to whom "the God-like Gift" is assigned; in their state of Divine Grace, they "gaze her Visionswild" (1. 22). Because of the spatial arrangement of "Wonder" and "'Truth"on the centerpiece of our triptych, "near" the locus of the poeticalcharacter, "the sainted growing Woof" denotes a requisite absorption ofcontrary elements in the aesthetic form:

All the shad'wy Tribes of Mind,In braided Dance their Murmurs join'd.And all the bright uncounted Pow'rs,Who feed on Heav'n's ambrosial Flow'rs.

(11. 47-50)

Ideally, '"Truth" and "Wonder," intellect and emotion, cooperate in the actof reading: the potential elements of unreason are harmonized in the"braided Dance"; and the "bright uncounted Pow'rs" are aptly reducedto a noun phrase rather than given a full clause in lines 47-48.

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While the strophe introduced the speaker as a reader of Spenser, theepode has contextualized the poetical character itself. Apollo and his' 'subject Life," poet and poetry, are spatially framed by Truth and Wonder.The question that closes the epode, "Where is the Bard . . . for Himdesign'd?" (U. 51-54), is logical both as a conclusion to this part and as atransition to the antistrophe. It marks the absence of the English bard inthe speaker's centerpiece and directs our attention to the second side panelof the triptych—allowing only a glimpse of Milton's lofty habitat.

Instead of lapsing into didactic closure, the speaker examines furtherthe reading process and now presents it as a solitary excursion into wildnature in contrast to the crowded tournament in the strophe; unlike thequiet contemplation of Spenserian beauty, the pursuit of the sublimeinvolves climbing a mountain, whose peak is Milton's poetic Eden. Thescene of the antistrophe recalls a Romantic allegorical painting, say, JohnMartin's 'The Bard, though the topographical difference between Collins'sand this artist's placement of the figure in the landscape is instructive.Martin's poet seems to be wholly immersed in the scenery; Collins'screative reader, however, is not an integral part of the setting but hasprojected Milton's Eden at a distance, on top of a cliff. He knows that itis there; but at the same time he depends on his own, limited, sense ofwonder to incorporate words into something substantial. What he sees areprecisely the natural barriers that remind him of his own limitations asa remote reader:

High on some Cliff, to Heav'n up-pil'd.Of rude Access, of Prospect wild.Where, tangled round the jealous Steep,Strange Shades o'erbrow the Valleys deep.And holy Genii guard the Rock,Its Gloomes embrown, its Springs unlock.

(11. 55-60)

The predicament of the speaker In his experience, amidst elements which"o'erbrow," "guard," and "embrown," contrasts sharply with the orderof the "braided dance" in the epode. Even before Milton's name ismentioned, the imposition of a literary landscape on top of the natural scenesuggests that the nearest the speaker can get to an ideal of human existenceis through a textual allusion: the Eden is like Milton's own. Perhaps mostremarkable is the eerie absence of the poet himself. Instead of attemptingto describe the historical occupant in this Eden, the speaker acts like atourist guide and simply points out that Milton once dreamt there:

I view that Oak, the fancied Glades among.By which as Milton lay. His Ev'ning Ear,From many a Cloud that drop'd Ethereal Dew,Nigh spher'd in Heav'n its native Strains could hear:On which that ancient Trump he reach'd was hung.

(U. 63-67)

Reading Paradise Lost conjures up the poetical character implicit in thephysical scene and reveals traces of the inspired genius, for Milton is theonly English poet who ever "reach'd" that "ancient Trump." Ironically,

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although "Poetical Character" is a fine example of Milton's influence oneighteenth-century poetry, within the poem's fiction this bard is theinimitable master, surpassing Spenser's art, which does have a "School"(1. 3) and thus presumably is inferior because it can be imitated.

The position of the speaker-reader vis-a-vis Milton's text is morecomplex than that towards Spenser's text; the intertwining of author andtext in Milton's case, the use of an author's work to define the authorhimself as inextricably part of this work, implies the dire isolation of thereader. This fact brings us back to the speaker's purpose of reading: insteadof trying to "read that gifted Bard [Spenser] aright," which highlights theproduct of intellect, the speaker here evokes the process of inspiration and"flow" in the activity. He has retreated from Waller's "Myrtle Shades,"the deceptive shadows of inferior lyric poetry, but he is unable to scalethe heights of epic sublimity afterwards. By situating himself within thetext in the antistrophe, the speaker now makes explicit the parallel to thedisappointed nymphs in Spenser's text; he has himself become a sufferingliterary character, the distressed poet.

Notwithstanding the elegiac tone of "Poetical Character," Collinsexhibits a deUberate control in portraying the speaker as creative readerthat simply goes against this poet's alleged pessimism and sense of failure.The sentimental trope of "Poor dear Collins," probably influenced byJohnson's Savage, has prejudiced responses to a poem written well beforethe author's mental breakdown and final barren period; consequently, itspeculiar blend of pathos and critical judgment is too cheaply taken for apersonal crisis rather than comprehended as a mimetic contrivance. Whatis most remarkable is Collins's spatial metaphor for the act of reading, akind of marionette show with the speaker pulling the strings, closing thecurtains at the end after giving us a glimpse of the ever elusive poeticcharacter. Granted his sincerity in lamenting the eclipse of heroic poetryand his own plight of living in the Enlightenment, Collins used this "story"to advantage and fashioned a reflexive poem-within-a-poem by focusingon the speaker-writer as reader, actively engaged in bringing forth the poeticcharacter. It is the state of mind of the performer that is his proper subjecthere; and just as Wallace Stevens's "metaphysician in the dark" is on handto contribute something of his own to the poet's creation, so the readerof Spenser and Milton is no idle receptacle but is profoundly involved withthe furor poesis. Pope's youthful Essay on Criticism, of course, addressedthe same idea of cooperation between poet and critic ("A perfect Judgewill read each Work of Wit/ With the same Spirit that its Author writ"];but by the time of the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot and the Dunciad, years ofvicious attacks from his enemies in the press resulted in a paranoic distrustof the reader's role in forming the poetic character. Wholly without thesaririst's venomous rage, however, like his friends the Wartons, Collins seesthe Augustan age not as a wasteland but as one of cultural accretion, wherepermanent values are to be gleaned from literary history and the "poemof the mind."

The University of Illinois

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NOTES> Samuel Johnson, "William Collins," Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck

Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), III, 337. Modern biographies have also supportedthe "poor Collins" view: see, for instance, H. W. Garrod, Collins (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1928); Edward G. Ainsworth, Jr., Poor Collins: His Life, His Art, and His Influence(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1937); and P. L. Carver, The Life of a Poet: A Biography ofWilliam Collins (New York: Horizon Press, 1967). For a more balanced perspective onCollins's mind, see Richard Wendorf, William Collins and Eighteenth-Century Poetry(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1981), pp. 3-26. Without speculating on Collins'sactual mood during the composition of "Poetical Character," I believe that he may havebeen influenced by the Savage story to the extent of imitating the narrative stance inthat poet's The Wanderer, especially in the mountain-climbing scenario of the antistrophe.

2 Martha Collins, "The Self-Conscious Poet: The Case of William Collins," ELH, 42(1975), 365.

3 Northrop Frye's germinal essay "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility," ELH,23 (1956), 144-52, provides a historical context for Collins's dilemma. For important closereadings of "Ode on the Poetical Character," see A. S. P. Woodhouse, "The Poetry ofCollins Reconsidered," From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A.Pottle (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 93-137; Earl Wasserman, "Collins's•Ode on the Poetical Character,' " ELH, 34 (1967), 92-115; Patricia Meyer Spacks, ThePoetry of Vision: Five Eighteenth-Century Poets (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967),pp. 78-82; and Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970 (NewHaven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 311-36.

For more positive readings, see Paul Fry, The Poet's Calling in the English Ode (NewHaven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980); Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986); Janice Haney-Peritz, " 'In Quest of Mistaken Beauties':AUegoricai Indeterminacy in Collins' Poetry," ELH, 48 (1981), 732-56; and Casey Finch,"Immediacy in the Odes of William Collins," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 20 (1987), 275-95.

Paul S. Sherwin, on the other hand, gives an extremely dark reading of "Ode on thePoetical Character" in Precious Bane: Collins and the Miltonic Legacy (Austin: Univ. ofTexas Press, 1977), calling the "reigning mood" of this poem "hysteria" (p. 15).

* Claude Rawson, Order from Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literaturefrom Swift to Cowper (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 151. Richard Wendorf,William Collins and Eighteenth-Century Poetry, p. 42.

5 Frederic V. Bogel, Literature and Insubstantiality in Later Eighteenth-Century England(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), p. ix. The issue of cultural insubstantiality hadbeen raised earlier by Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet(Cambridge:The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), and by Geoffrey Hartman,Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970. Bate refers in particular to the problem ofgenre by referring to Collins's "Lines on Sir Thomas Hanmer's Edition of Shakespeare"(pp. 44-45), and Hartman puts the question historically: "Could poetry outlive theEnlightenment, when it was perfectly clear that the great works of the past had beenbased on 'Superstition'?" (p. 319).

« "Ode to Fear," 11. 54 and 57, The Works of William Collins, ed. Richard Wendorfand Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), p. 33. All quotations from Collins'spoetry are from this edition.

' Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton:Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), p. 393.

8 See The Works of William Collins, pp. 210-12.» Paul J. Korshin, "Probability and Character in the Eighteenth Century," in

Probability, Time and Space in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Paula R. Backscheider(New York: AMS Press, 1979), pp. 63-77. Korshin establishes a link between "character"and "predictability": "a probable character could be one whose behavior, attitudes,qualities, etc. conform so closely to an accepted mold that an audience, on making itsacquaintance, would be able to predict how this person would act" (p. 65). From thisperspective, readings that define the "poetical character" as poetry (Martha Collins, "TheSelf-Conscious Poet," p. 362), on the one hand, and as the poet (Ainsworth, Poor Collins,

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p. 97), on the other, miss the dynamic process implicit in the ode's title. In his deftreading of the Apollonian figure, Wendorf stresses the mediating function of the poeticcharacter as part divinity: "he supplies the poet with a sense of possibility; he inspiresthe poet, lending him his imaginative spark" [William Collins and Eighteenth-Century Poetry,p. 49).

1" Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, III, 337-38." Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Selected Letters, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1987), pp. 40-41." See Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime, (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,

1985), p. 67.13 Douglas Lane Patey, Probability and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory and Literary

Practice in the Augustan Age (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 93, 94. Inthe same vein. Pope charges Spenser's pastorals with improbability: "He is sometimestoo allegorical, and treats of matters of religion in a pastoral style . . . ," "A Discourseon Pastoral Poetry," in Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and AubreyWilliams, The Twickenham Edition, Vol. I (London: Meuthuen; New York: Yale Univ.Press, 1961), p. 31.

" The editors of the Oxford edition read "gaze" in line 22 as "gaze upon," The Worksof William Collins, p. 134. But this is to lose the original force that Collins surely intendsby the transitive form, just as he does in line 44, with "List'ning the deep applaudingThunder."

'= Bogel, p. 88." Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry from the Close of the Eleventh Century

to the Commencement of the Eighteenth, 4 Vols. (London, 1774), I, 468." As Bogel points out: "In encounters like these the poet's present experience is for

a moment charged with energies that had elsewhere seemed the exclusive property ofa vanished past, or (much the same thing) he is for a moment carried back to that past,"p. 89.

»« Alexander Pope, An Essay in Criticism, Part I, 11. 100-03, in Pastoral Poetry, ed. E.Audra and Aubrey Williams, pp. 250-51.

I should like to thank Professor John Dussinger, University of Illinois, for hisencouragement and advice in the writing of this essay.