SOURCE: "The Romanticism of William Collins," in Studies in Philology, Vol. XX, No. 1, January, 1923, pp. 1-16.

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

By common consent William Collins is reckoned among those writers who prepared the way for the full romantic revival, and yet it requires some care to reach a precise estimate of his work and to calculate its trend. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century a thousand roads led men from the neo-classical temple of taste and wit, and we find Collins, like many others, making his way along these various paths. When he inscribes to John Home An Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland, we know where to have him; it is clear whence the poem derives and whither it tends. Professor Beers has pointed out in the work of Collins's...