SOURCE: "Immediacy in the Odes of William Collins," in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3, Spring, 1987, pp. 275-95.

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.

For poems that are often considered obscure, the 1746 Odes of William Collins have sparked surprisingly little debate in the criticism that has grown around them in the last two hundred years. Outside of a handful of minor controversies,¹ the critical literature overall is sadly homogeneous. Again and again, antecedents and models for the Odes are located in Milton, in Spenser, in Aristotle;² Collins is seen as a self-conscious "genius," a lonely singer of songs who, as such, prefigures the romantic poets;³ and poems themselves are described as visionary, pictorial, and sublime essays of the poetical imagination which combine within the odic form the tradition of the...