SOURCE: "Collins's Ode on the Poetical Character," in The Visonary Company: A Reading of English Poetry, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1961, pp. 3-10.

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.

… if we say that the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called, even if poetry that involves us vitally, the feeling of deliverance, of a release, of a perfection touched, of a vocation so that all men may know the truth and that the truth may set them free—if we say these things and if we are able to see the poet who achieved God and placed Him in His seat in heaven in all His glory, the poet himself, still in...