This section contains 7,636 words (approx. 26 pages at 300 words per page) |
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SOURCE: "The Eighteenth-Century Collins," in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 1, March, 1983, pp. 3-22.
In the following essay, Spacks argues for a less-Romantic, rational view of the poetry of William Collins (1721-1759), whose central emotions and preoccupations—namely anxiety and the demonic—have led to his increased reputation among late twentieth-century critics.
William Collins sounds different now from the Collins we used to know. For example, Paul S. Sherwin claims, "Collins feels, all right; but what he feels most urgently is his estrangement from the passionate integrity of unself-conscious or 'unmixed' feeling. Impatient and aching, he is a fever of himself, his intensity springing directly from baffled desire."1 This feverish figure, "one of the doomed poets of an Age of Sensibility," to use Harold Bloom's words,2 reveals, like Smart and "the great Romantics," a "struggle with his vocation," the fate of the post-Miltonic writer.3 He explores problems of sexuality...
This section contains 7,636 words (approx. 26 pages at 300 words per page) |
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