Precious Bane: Collins and the Miltonic Legacy 9781477303016

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Precious Bane

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Precious Bane Collins and the Miltonic Legacy by Paul S. Sherwin

University of Texas Press Austin

The publication of this book was assisted by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Sherwin, Paul S 1946Precious bane. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Collins, William, 1721-1759—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Milton, John, 1608-1674— Influence—Collins. I. Title. PR3354.S5 821'.5 77-542 ISBN 0 - 2 9 2 - 7 6 4 3 8 - 3 Copyright © 1977 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

For My Dear Mother & Father

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Contents Acknowledgments ix 1. Introduction 3 2. The "Ode on the Poetical Character" 15 3. Rapture and Purgatory Blind 37 4. In Dreams Begin Responsibilities 62 5. A Poetry of the Evening Ear 102 Notes 125 Index 133

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Acknowledgments Interpretation, for Vico, is interpatrari, an entering into the fathers. Writing about influence enforces a realization of how variously fathered one is. To Angus Fletcher, Martin Price, and Paul de Man I owe enormous intellectual debts. Louis Renza, my good friend, will often recognize his presence amidst mine. Leslie Brisman was the most exacting and instructive reader of my manuscript. In addition to raising several provocative questions, Joseph A. Wittreich, Jr., suggested important structural changes in the book. I also wish to acknowledge the helpful criticisms of the late W. K. Wimsatt. Puzzling over what Milton "teaches," De Quincey decided that it was power. The power generated by my two principal mentors, Geoffrey Hartman and Harold Bloom, is the driving force behind this study. Hartman first showed me how to read Collins and how to elicit largescale resonances from detail and nuance. Bloom guided and suffered with my manuscript for more years than I care to remember. He awakened me to the problem of influence, and the astonishing energy of his mind has impressed upon me, more profoundly than any direct teaching, the sorrows and exaltation of being influenced by a great precursor. My son Matthew, who couldn't understand why his father was often living hundreds of years away, at least merits his first mention in print. My wife Linda, at once interior and exterior paramour, deserves the ultimate acknowledgment: this book, and much else, is ours.

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Precious Bane

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1. Introduction In his brief career William Collins wrote a handful of enduring poems. We are obliged to ask why a talent of such magnitude produced so little, an inquiry that leads to a consideration of the sorrows of the Age of Sensibility, for no other poet of his generation offers us more than Collins. Only Smart in the Jubilate Agno rivals his capacity to break through into the Sublime, the leaping forth of spirit, or to evoke the dying splendor of the spirit's breaking. He is, again with the possible exception of Smart, the most inventive poet in an era obsessively concerned with, but rarely distinguished by, Original Genius. Certainly he is the most variously original: his best works are daring experiments, each radically unique. Collins' originality, moreover, is originative. Romanticism can rightly be called a renaissance of the Renaissance, but it was founded upon a drastic revision of its heritage, and if we are to grasp the transition between old- and new-style romance consciousness, we can do no better than to focus on Collins. A child of the Enlightenment who sought to recapture the affirmative freedoms of the past, he wrote a group of poems remarkable for their proleptic or prophetic reserve: the " O d e on the Poetical Character" is the first of a long line of Romantic crisis poems of poetic incarnation, the "Ode to Fear" heralds the Romantics' ambivalent embrace of their internalized daemonic energies, the "Popular Superstitions Ode" broaches the great Romantic debate between the superstitious and enlightened minds, and the "Ode to Evening" ushers in a new kind of purified nature poetry that culminates in Wordsworth and Keats. The diversity of Collins' achievement, however, is a problem. We need an image of his poetical character, a sense of the peculiar fatality of his imagination. Yet which Collins is the "real" Collins: the simple, the sensuous, or the impassioned Collins, Collins the theorist or Collins the enthusiast of romance? Not only do poems and groups of poems cultivate divergent and often contrary experiences, but single poems tend to be divided against themselves, pitting mood against mood, vision against vision. How then, if at all, can interpretation find a way amidst this multiplicity of voices without violating the integrity of his individual genius? Hazlitt remarks that for all his "patch-work," Collins "has not been able to hide the solid sterling ore of his genius." 1 But by what means are we to ransack the center in order to disclose this hidden treasure? I suspect that Collins' restless experimentation is a manifestation of the self-begetting drive which is the one dominant impulse of all his writing.

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He shares in the interpreter's quest for his spiritual form. In order to locate a point of departure he adopts a number of strategies, invoking many a goddess by many a name, hoping to discover an agency that will somehow quicken his regeneration from irresolution and dependence to assured self-mastery. His quest for that Archimedean point is baffled however, and Collins habitually confronts himself as an "admiring youth" ("Ode to Simplicity," 1. 26) destined to be shuttled about from pain to ecstasy in an unending cycle. There is no purer instance of the adolescent experience in English literature than Collins' poetic life (and death) cycle. The more avidly he pursues his identity the more it recedes. Engaged in a continual rite of passage, he becomes a prisoner of the passage, a liminal being vertiginously suspended between self-loss and self-presence. To understand why Collins' quest for emergence is thwarted we must determine the relationship between his individual genius and the genius of the literary past. In the Philosophical Fragments Kierkegaard wonders whether a historical point of departure is possible for an eternal consciousness, and we ought to worry along with him. Collins wishes to discover his own imaginative autonomy, that special consciousness which brings a man home to himself, yet his quest is contaminated by otherness and time's ravages. The very shape of his quest, as well as the ideal of poethood he aspires to, are dependent on traditional forms.2 The past for Collins is at once preserver and destroyer. He turns to it for guidance, all the more strongly because of his extreme uncertainty, but his uncertainty is magnified as he compares his own misgivings with the sublime self-assurance of his major precursors. Implicated in a historical quest for an eternal consciousness, Collins suffers "the remorseless deepening of self-consciousness, before the rich and intimidating legacy of the past" which Walter Jackson Bate designates as the greatest single problem faced by the modern artist. 3 The burden of the past, it can be argued, is as old as literary tradition itself. Even Chaucer in The House of Fame questions whether he is fated to be a lesser Virgil or Ovid. But that burden had never been so onerous in previous eras, and the mere fact of an undeniably rich and comprehensive body of native literature extending from Spenser to Milton is insufficient to explain the massive depletion anxiety that afflicts the enlightened writer. What went wrong then? The distressing answer is precisely what went right: the civilizing advances of the Enlightenment. Endemic to the period is a belief that imaginative poetry and the spirit of the age are incompatible. Here is Thomas Blackwell: "It is thus that a Peoples Felicity clips the Wings of their Verse: It affords few Materials for Admiration or Pity; and tho' the Pleasure arising from a Taste of the

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sublimer Kinds of Writing, may make your Lordship regret the Silence of the Muses, yet I am persuaded you will join in the Wish, that we may never be a proper Subject of an Heroic poem." 4 Blackwell's assessment reduces to the following unhappy formula: the progress of society is coincident with the regress of poetry. The reflective modern temperament precludes an indulgence of those powerful, unambiguous feelings that are the staple of great literature. Underlying this fear of lost immediacy and threatening the very basis of literary discourse is the growing suspicion that the glorious and erroneous are twinborn, that the former is contingent upon the latter. The modern writer's only means of access into the generous world of his fathers are willful self-deception and madness. The Enlightenment meant that the past was past. Again, the enlightened writer's experience of the past at once resembles and diverges sharply from the Renaissance writer's. Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton knew their distance from the past, especially the classical past, but distance is not discontinuity. For them the past, at least what was most essential about the past, was not irremediably past. They could convert its wealth to modern coinage, redeeming all imaginative traditions whatsoever, including Christianity. But this principle of displacement is no longer applicable to the enlightened artist, for he lacks a greater or more refined magic that would enable him to subsume outmoded forms. He cannot purify ancient myths because the Enlightenment seems to have purified myth out of existence. One consequence of this estrangement from the past, as Bate notes, is the falsifying idealization of nostalgia. In Collins, for instance, celebration of the past is intrinsically elegiac, the commemoration of an unreturning golden age of primal sympathies and profligate creative energies. A related danger for the writer who feels he is not in the right place at the right time, who shares the impulses of the past but not the substance to which they were attached, is archaism. Undertaking a desperate imitatio, the archaizing writer confounds the way with the truth in his attachment to the guiding forms of the past; what had served earlier poets as a mediation freezes into an expressive though nonconductive medium. Moreover, in the absence of a reconciling dialectic between past and present, intrapoetic relations undergo a radical, qualitative change. The precursor, magnified by virtue of estrangement, becomes a preemptive force, but an uncannily exterior and interior one, since he is the bearer of the later writer's own estranged spiritual potential. In short, influence has become daemonic. The problem for the modern writer, then, is not so much what is left to be done, Bate's focus, as it is what of his own he can call his own. In his pioneering studies of literary influence Harold Bloom nominates

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Milton as the chief daemonic precursor of the Sensibility poets and the Romantics. Milton's impact on the writers of the Augustan tradition, although not so great or fearful, also merits consideration. Dryden is reported to have remarked after first reading Paradise Lost, "This man cuts us all, and the ancients too," 5 but neither the bulk of his pronouncements on Milton nor the majority of his poems betrays an especially anxious attitude toward his republican contemporary. Dryden is afflicted by a more generalized blight of secondariness, and any precursor, whether native or classical, is liable to arouse his creative envy. His most significant encounter with Milton is in Absalom and Achitophel, where Paradise Lost is a much deeper analogue than the biblical account of Absalom. From Milton he derives the structure of his political "cosmos" and his principal characterizations, which gain in dignity and resonance as a result of the comparison. What matters most, however, is the way Dryden exploits the fact that his is a later and considerably lesser version of Milton's universal story by establishing a continual ironic counterpoint between Milton's drama and his own. 6 The relative impoverishment of Dryden's poem does not reflect adversely on him; rather, it reinforces his attack upon the triviality of his own times. Pope resorts to much the same strategy in his version of Paradise Lost upside down, The Dunciad. As the light of sense goes out throughout the cosmos, Pope remains the sole articulator of the Word, an embattled hero of morality, reason, and humanistic culture. If he is not quite the sublime solitary of the invocations of Paradise Lost, the fault lies with his world, not himself. Had Milton lived during Pope's benighted age he would have been constrained to write such an account of the Fall. Like Dryden, Pope comes to terms with Milton in a satiric context. In "Messiah" and parts of An Essay on Man he is guilty of indeliberate bathos, due largely to his inability to handle the Miltonic high style. But in The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad he is at once freest with Milton and freest to exercise his extraordinary mythopoeic vigor. For Pope the negative way is the way to gain power over his world and the potentially overpowering presence of Milton. The Johnsonian Milton is a more problematic figure, for Milton is almost as consuming a problem for Johnson as Johnson himself. To censure Milton, Johnson says, is to impugn the national honor. Nevertheless, he does not shrink from the task. The infamous attacks on "Lycidas" and Samson Agonistes aside, Johnson is generally an enthusiastic partisan of Milton's poetry; his principal criticisms are leveled against the man. He sees Milton's republicanism as the manifestation of "an envious hatred of greatness, and a sullen desire of independence; in petulance impatient of controul, and pride disdainful of superiority. . . .

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he hated all whom he was required to obey. It is to be suspected, that his predominant desire was to destroy rather than establish, and that he felt not so much the love of liberty as repugnance to authority." 7 Confronting Milton the man, Johnson beholds Satan: "He loves himself rather than truth." 8 Milton's fierce independence, however, is an aesthetic virtue. Paradise Lost receives Johnson's highest praise as the most original of modern poems. Who else but Milton could have summoned the audacity to augment the Word of God? Johnson, on the other hand, is a methodically circumspect poet. "The Vanity of Human Wishes" grows out of the most austere section of Paradise Lost, Adam's initial prospect of disease and death in Book XI, a visionary event staged to help him patiently endure his "mortal passage." The "Vanity" is a vain quest for an unvain wish. Throughout the poem Johnson resolutely opposes himself not only to the restless aspiration of the worldly but to the "generous heat" of the Miltonic visionary, who will ultimately be defeated by grim realities. Imaginative activity is a torment for Johnson because he regards it as vain wish fulfillment. It is a glorious lie. So, if "reality was a scene too narrow" for Milton's mind, 9 Johnson chooses, or at least prays that he may submit to choose, the "narrow round" of Dr. Levet. A true Augustan, he seeks to narrow the circumference of mind in the hope that the center may hold better, choosing a precarious knowledge because he knows how dangerously powerful his own mind is. 10 Near the end of his life of Milton Johnson writes that "like other heroes, he is to be admired rather than imitated." 11 Johnson's may be a sane approach, but the Sensibility poets, for the most part, reject it in favor of the high road of generous emulation. Akenside's "To the Muse" is characteristic. His inspiration blocked, he weighs various strategies for renewing his dampened creative spirits. At last he conjures with Milton's sacred name: O powerful strain! O sacred soul! His numbers every sense control: And now again my bosom burns; The Muse, the Muse herself returns. Milton is the Muse; it is to him that the Sensibility poets turn when they look, not to the classics as the Augustans had advised, but homeward—to the sources of poetic genius within. Akenside's poem is also typical in that it announces rather than evinces an upsurge of inspiration. Milton is the anti-Muse of the Sensibility poets as well. Still, most of their finest achievements are inspired by the Miltonic legacy, and their reaction to him is no abstract tribute. Milton had as-

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serted the prophetic voice in a time of troubles, asserted it more vigorously than ever before when such poets as Cowley, Marvell, and Dryden were abandoning the noble enterprises of the Renaissance. He is the most profound crisis poet in the language. His personal conflicts, moreover, are not only akin to his descendants' but are a major source of the problems of subsequent poetry. After Milton the umbilical link to the fortunate fields of romance is cut forever, and as Milton's personal history shows, after Paradise Lost both poetry and the poet must linger on shadowy ground, "homeward returning" only by making good the risks of continuous spiritual warfare. When the Sensibility poets confront Milton they behold the apotheosis of power. Gray, more scrupulous than most, shares Johnson's fears about the irreconcilability of goodness and greatness. But before his anxiety surfaces at the end of "The Progress of Poesy" he reaches his supreme moment as a poet when he places Milton in the Chariot of Paternal Deity: 12 Nor second he, that rode sublime Upon the seraph-wings of Ecstasy, The secrets of the abyss to spy. He passed the flaming bounds of place and time: The living throne, the sapphire-blaze, Where angels tremble while they gaze, He saw; but blasted with excess of light, Closed his eyes in endless night. By the 1740's Milton is securely enthroned as the poet of the Sublime, an epochless being who drew his inspiration from deeper and older sources than any other poet. If not God the Father himself, he is God's prophet. He is, however, no mere amanuensis, a chosen vessel,13 for Milton fills the Sublime with his own exuberant selfhood, achieving a Sublime in which the mind learns its own sublimity. In Leviathan Hobbes, archfoe of enthusiasm, challenges his readers to explain how the true prophet is to be distinguished from the pretender in an age too late for miracles. The problem seems to have worried Milton too, but he knew that the prophet's only claim to authority was the sheer power of his voice. Leslie Brisman observes that in Milton "the distance of poet from reader is . . . felt as the measure of the authority of the voice." 14 That authority and that distance were to inspire and scandalize later aspirants to the Sublime. The force of Milton's personality, always felt as a presence slightly apart from the text, helps explain his historical importance. Influence, in

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essence, is a seductive process, and seduction depends on a strongly ambivalent personal attachment. The seducer must be close enough to promise satisfaction of desire and distant enough to raise desire to a previously unimagined intensity. Shakespeare could never fulfill that role for later poets. According to Coleridge, "Shakspere's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspere; but John Milton is in every line of the 'Paradise Lost.' " 1 5 The increasingly subjective bias of modern poetry, fostered by the Reformation and Cartesian dualistic consciousness, made an association of the egotistical and the Sublime inevitable, thereby drawing poets into a Miltonic orbit. 16 But the modern writer is unable to fill the void of solitude with his presence as Milton had done. "I tremble at myself, / And in myself am lost!" writes Young in Night Thoughts. The difference is attributable not only to Milton's dazzling self-confidence; his Inner Light may be an absolute force, yet it is conjoined to another absolute, the Word of God, and the two forces are mutually sustaining. Remove that externality from the imagination and privacy will become more a curse than a blessing. The history of post-Miltonic poetry suggests that Milton himself supplants the Word as the element of otherness in the imagination of later poets. By asserting a more-than-poetical role for the poet, Milton aggravates the plight of his descendants, who share Milton's prophetic aspirations yet fear that they bear no gospel. Naked of external pieties, they are reduced to telling the story of themselves, a situation that lends itself to much defensive counterassertiveness. There is, however, one remaining myth they subscribe to, and that is the story of poetry's former glory. It is extravagant yet hardly an exaggeration to say that the typical poem of the Sensibility era is a ghostly conclave attended by the selfhood and tradition, primarily the Miltonic tradition. A battleground is probably a more accurate metaphor, as Bloom argues, with the latecomer the inevitable victim. How could it be otherwise when the precursor has been deified? If Gray is blinded by Milton's light and so cannot further the progress of poetry, if the Wartons cannot help but be Miltonic ventriloquists, if Young must say Urania deigns to visit him nightly, Milton is not the problem, at least not wholly the problem. Anxiety over Milton, or rather the self-imposed phantom Milton has become, is a synecdoche for a more pervasive creative anxiety. Indeed, that larger anxiety can be allayed, although not overcome, when the latecomer is sufficiently inspired by Milton to abandon his too self-consciously Miltonic postures. In general the Sensibility poets are at their best when they forsake the awesome ancestral bard of Paradise Lost for the more benign presence of the minor poems, as Thomson does in much of The Seasons. Unfortunately,

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they tend to be restless on that middle ground, more frequently vacillating between Milton at his most sublime and Pope at his most sententious in a disastrous middle void. Insofar as Milton is at once Collins' evil and emancipating genius, his relationship to Milton is representative. Milton's poetry is sacred ground for Collins, and he attempts to draw strength from it in an astonishing variety of ways. He may appropriate Milton's stanzaic patterns, personification techniques, or romance imagery; and sometimes, caught by a Miltonic theme or mood, he may explore its possibilities in a single image or through the course of an entire poem. The most obvious manifestation of this confusion of mine and thine is Collins' reliance on the Miltonic language, which often confirms the wisdom of Wordsworth's strictures against "poetic diction." It arises, he says, when poets perceive the appeal of a precursor's language and "desirous of producing the same effect without being animated by the same passion, set themselves to a mechanical adoption of these figures of speech." 17 Miltonic pastiche can be found almost anywhere in Collins; 18 nor is it honest to dignify such opiate dependence with the names of echo or allusion. The sacred place is indiscriminately plundered for its riches; the mysterious, evasive, distinctly personal genius of the master's language is literalized and reduced to common coinage. When Collins is least a poet he longs to call Milton's poetic cosmos his own. What seems to me the most distressing aspect of this covetousness is that it may have induced Collins to miscalculate his own poetical character. The new territory he charts in the "Ode to Evening" and the "Popular Superstitions Ode" could have opened the way to an imaginative homeland less jealously guarded than Milton's visionary topocosm and better suited to his individual genius. Still, it is difficult to imagine how Collins could have made his major breakthroughs without Milton's guidance, or without the understanding born of his dubious battle with Milton's overshadowing presence. None of the Sensibility poets is vitalized by Milton's influence to the extent that Collins is. A significant feature of such positive influence is that it usually operates in the depths. When influence ceases to be mere repetition and becomes re-creation the latecomer is so adept at veiling or transfiguring his source that the interpreter must thread his way through a network of subsurface implications. For example, in these much-admired lines from the "Ode to Pity," Long, Pity, let the nations view Thy sky-worn robes of tenderest blue, And eyes of dewy light! (10-12) 1 9

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there is no question of directly echoing Milton. Most commentators have called attention to the passage's vividly pictorial character. 20 Yet although he begins, in the manner of Thomson, by inviting us to "view" this image of Pity, the most conspicuous feature of the lines is the way Collins subtly organizes his language against visual representation, even while tending toward it. The initial interpretive problem is Pity's "skyworn robes." Are they to be equated with clouds, as in lines 6 - 8 of the "Ode to Evening"? "Blue clouds," however, seems to negate this reading. We are left with the adjectival "sky-worn," not unambiguous semantically, implying that (heaven-born) Pity wears her robes in the sky or that she is clothed in the blue embroidery of the heavens. The first possibility situates the goddess in relation to the admiring nations below; the second establishes a relationship between Pity and the landscape she inhabits, tempting a visionary identification of Pity and her landscape (i.e., she wears the sky or is the sky). While an iconographic reading would associate the blue-robed Pity with the Virgin Mary and find tears of divine compassion in her "eyes of dewy light," another reading, at once more naturalistic and visionary, is insinuated by Collins' association of the figure and its landscape. Do not these moist eyes suggest, in addition to tears, the rain, or dew, or manna-dew that descends from Pity's cloudy robes? No pictorial artist or poet, I believe, could have taught Collins such rich deviousness. Perhaps the painter can charge his canvas with all the meanings—visual, tactile, emotional—Collins is able to evoke through the word tenderest, but how could he duplicate the visual and aural punning of the poet's word (the original spelling is tend'rest: robes/often/ drest)? The manner in which Collins charms and deceives both eye and ear in this luminous passage recalls Milton, especially the Milton of the minor poems, more than any other previous poet. In Milton Collins found a poetry that could at once accommodate the fantastic and commonplace image, in which passionate figures larger than life could emerge from the metaphorical substructures of language. Collins' happiest verse, like Milton's in the minor poems, occupies the space between the extremes of descriptive and allegorical poetry, and, as in Milton, it is through a language reflective and subtly mythopoeic, but rarely visually explicit, that this mental space is bodied forth. When Collins is most a poet he knows that this is the space of poetry, available to all imaginative makers wise enough to recognize the traditional basis of poetic discourse and sufficiently daring to act upon this knowledge without succumbing to facile rationalizations which would subjugate the artist and his art to a declining stage in the history of culture. But such wisdom and daring are rare in Collins. His ordeal of

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soul making consists largely of his efforts—under Milton's aegis—to discover a voice that expresses his own individual genius and of his continual retreats from the pain of his emergent freedom into the repose of Milton's bosom. His poetry is often more original than it appears, or at least than he wishes it to appear. It is as though he fears a decisive break with Milton more than not individuating himself. Herein lies the essential difference between Collins' and the Romantics' more complex and combative imitation of Milton. The greater Romantics are all eager to locate and magnify their differences from Milton, either by means of fierce intellectual satire, as in the early Blake and Prometheus Unbound, or the usually submerged revisionary strife of Wordsworth and Keats. Unlike Collins, who would accommodate himself to Milton, they endeavor to accommodate Milton to themselves, opening up an emancipative breach between themselves and tradition by manipulating tradition, as Milton had done. 21 Collins is an important precursor of the Romantics because of his refusal to forsake visionary poetry despite his suspicion that the supreme fictions of the past are merely fictive. But he does not see, as they do, that a revivified mythopoeic literature could be founded upon an acceptance of this loss. Knowing they can no longer enumerate old themes, the Romantics shift the emphasis from the credibility or truth of fiction to man and whatever truth about himself he is able to perceive. New-style Romantic myth differs most dramatically from traditional myth in that it is turned principally toward art, the reservoir of forms from which it draws its being, which means that for the Romantics myth frequently becomes a confrontation with Milton on Milton's own ground of sublime fable. Their acknowledgment of the radical errancy of fiction is but one way the Romantics avoid repeating the imaginative errors of Collins and of his age in general. In "Mad Song," for instance, Blake mocks an individual with a strong but perverse imagination like Collins in the "Ode to Fear." The speaker is right to reject the false light of the Enlightenment for the light of imagination, but Blake implies that he has become deformed because he believes the Enlightenment's verdict on imagination, that it is linked to madness, darkness, evil. In "Sleep and Poetry" Keats, more directly, argues with Collins' stance in the "Ode on the Poetical Character." Keats also asks why "the high / Imagination cannot freely fly/ As she was wont of old?" (11. 163-165). Yet after sneering at the Augustan "handicraftsmen" and lamenting the doomed bards of Sensibility, he declares "Now 'tis a fairer season" (1. 221). Glorying in his vision of an Apollonian charioteer, he does not, like Collins, reduce his prototype of the poetical character to a specific historical personage, instead conceiving it as an intimation of his own future greatness. Hyperion is the record

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of Keats's premature and perhaps misguided attempt to incarnate Apollo. But although he fails to displace the ancestral Miltonic sun-god, mainly because he is being overwhelmed by Milton throughout the poem, he does not abandon his efforts to advance the progress of poetry or to master the Miltonic legacy. In the Great Odes and The Fall of Hyperion he is to engage in more powerful and subtle mental fight with Milton, marshaling his own comparatively unarmed vision against the allure of the Miltonic visionary's false surmises and thereby earning a measure of freedom from his great adversary. An index of his success is that "To Autumn," usually regarded as the fulfillment of the " O d e to Evening," has never, like Collins' poem, been called Miltonic. The struggle with Milton remains yet leaves no traces. It should be added that if Keats manages to ease the burden of Milton's influence, he is largely indebted to Wordsworth's example. Not only did Wordsworth naturalize and humanize the Miltonic Sublime; he opened it to the full range of individual potential, purging the traditional notion of the authorial persona. By so doing, he lightened the burden of selfhood even as he brought it to the center of literary enterprise. To Wordsworth modern poetry owes the recovery of Miltonic chastity, that withholding power by means of which the mind resists the powerful enchantments it induces. Let me not be misunderstood: I am not claiming that the Romantics subsumed or fulfilled Milton, even though they would have us believe they are their father redeemed of error and even though they did manage to displace him as the prime hero-adversary of later poets. Brisman's assertion that it is salubrious to think of the Miltonic legacy as "a bequest rather than a burden" 22 and Joseph Wittreich's claim that Milton taught the Romantics, at least Blake, "not to be constrained by tradition but to achieve freedom through it" 23 are attractive. My own position is that the Miltonic legacy was both a bequest and a burden for his Romantic heirs and that they were both liberated and constrained by Milton's example. The Romantics aim to supplant and subvert Milton, what might euphemistically be called "redemptive labor." But more often than not their revisionary works are less an elaboration of their own visions than a systematic dismemberment of Milton's. The Romantics, it is true, expose many of Milton's shortcomings, and as such his blindness becomes their insight. Nevertheless, there is a generative power of beauty and sublimity, a self-delighting grandeur in Milton that eludes them. Their counterassertiveness usually renounces more than it redresses. They cannot outstrip Milton because Milton, or rather the intensely personal struggle with Milton that energizes their mature art, sends them into the dark passages of a consciousness that must endure death and in death maintain its

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Introduction

being.24 They can no longer know the transport without the pain. As Nietzsche says, "The scope of any 'progress' is measured by all that must be sacrificed for its sake." 25 For those who believe, along with Blake, that "Los reads the Stars of Albion! the Spectre reads the Voids / Between the Stars," influencecriticism, which traces "the hidden roads that go from poem to poem," 26 may seem a calamity. I happen to find Bloom's studies of intrapoetic relations gloomily inspiriting, and above all heuristic. To each his own poison. My suspicion is that different poets and different poems demand different or numerous sorts of interpretive strategies. There are advantages to equating (if one must be reductive) Blake's tyger with the spirit of revolution, or Blake himself, or "The Tyger" itself, or the speaker's own estranged imaginative potential, but there is much to say for a reading which identifies it as Milton, who is similarly a terror in the fallen world of the poem Milton. In the ensuing pages I hope to demonstrate that an interpretation of Collins which aims at completeness cannot ignore Milton's importance for him, and that reading Collins in continual awareness of Milton enriches one's understanding of descendant and precursor alike. What remains to be seen is how Collins malforms and individuates himself in relation to the "precious bane" of the Miltonic legacy.

2. The "Ode on the Poetical Character55 The " O d e on the Poetical Character," writes John Langhorne, "is so extremely wild and exorbitant, that it seems to have been written wholly during the tyranny of imagination." 1 He may be exaggerating, but he is responding properly to an essential feature of the ode. For it is a very strange poem. Tradition, of course, sanctioned rugged irregularity in the Greater Ode, but it shares with Collins' own "Ode to Liberty" the distinction of being the most eccentric and aggressively unfamiliar Pindaric of the period. Three forcefully imagined, discontinuous visionary settings are crowded into the space of seventy-six lines, often syntactically obscure and contorted, with little subordination, few connectives or active verbs, and numerous exclamatory interjections. Yet although its reigning mood is hysteria, the ode also evinces a lust for method that borders on the compulsive. Not only is there massive repetition of key words and images, but the strophe-mesode-antistrophe structure, unique to Collins, adds a dimension of symmetry to Pindar's already strict formal regularity. The restrictions imposed by the form, however, serve less to curb than to incite the imagination to transgress those limits. Discontinuity overwhelms the urge to posit continuity. The ode is a string of dangerous crossings, of hyperbolic leaps that alternately induce the rapture of flight and the despondency of relapse.2 Perhaps the oddest thing about the poem is that Collins is very much aware of his leaping and falling. It is an oppressively self-conscious work by a writer who is troubled, who knows he is, and who wants his readers to experience the uncertainties of writing a poem about the poetical character. Like "Kubla Khan," its closest Romantic counterpart, the ode tempts a sexual configuration of the ordeal of poethood: passing from the dalliance of the strophe; through the gathering excitement, climax, and relaxation of the mesode; and on to the perverse guilt of the antistrophe. While it is necessary to be on one's guard against such crass reductionism, a reading of the poem as sexual phantasmagoria clarifies the urgency prompting Collins throughout and helps to explain why his satisfaction is so short-lived. The following passage from a suppressed draft of William Hamilton's "Ode to Fancy" is apposite: Fierce to her lips my lips I join, Fierce in amorous folds we twine; Fierce in rage of love compressed,

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The "Ode on the Poetical Character"

Swells throbbing to the touch her breast, Thus rioting in bliss supreme, Might I enjoy the golden dream! But ah! the rapture will not stay, For see, she glides, she glides away! 3 Collins also presents himself as a lover of Fancy in the ode, asking to "feel unmixed her flame!" (1. 22), and is also betrayed by his muse despite— maybe because of—the intensity of his ardor. In Collins, however, the betrayal occurs only after the object of his enthusiasm shifts from Fancy to Milton, with Milton assuming the dual role of beloved Muse and intimidating Father in this curious aberration of the Oedipal ordeal. We glimpse here the real, if often submerged, drama of the ode. For Milton is present from the outset, secretly presiding over the nativity ode in the strophe and mesode and directly influencing the lapse into dejection ode in the antistrophe. The spiritual drama governing the ode is typical of Collins: a spectral confrontation between Collins as aspiring youth and various incarnations of the poetical Milton. We must begin where Milton did, with Spenser. Collins situates us in the world of The Faerie Queene at the opening of the strophe, deriving his master image from the account of FlorimePs magic girdle: That girdle gaue the virtue of chast loue, And wiuehood true, to all that did it beare; But whosoeuer contrarie doth proue, Might not the same about her middle weare, But it would loose, or else a sunder teare. (IV, v, 3, 1-5) There is some healthy, self-directed irony in Collins' initial remark, "As once if not with light regard / I read aright that gifted bard." For in claiming that "One, only one, unrivalled fair" (1. 5) might wear the magic girdle, he deliberately misreads The Faerie Queene, where this chastity belt can be sustained by both Florimel and Amoret. That insistent "One, only one, unrivalled," contradicting the "few" of line 20, is the first manifestation of Collins' anxiety, a dread which utterly routs his urbanity when he goes on to portray the fierce rebuke visited upon the unchaste who aspire to this elusive and, for them, illusive prize: Lo! to each other nymph in turn applied, As if, in air unseen, some hovering hand, Some chaste, and angel-friend to virgin-fame, With whispered spell had burst the starting band,

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17

It left unblest her loathed, dishonoured side; Happier hopeless fair, if never Her baffled hand with vain endeavour Had touched that fatal zone to her denied! (9-16) Something is awry: Collins' shift to excited rhetoric here looks forward to the failure of the antistrophe, betokening a perverse sublimity born of desire's frustration. The strophe concludes hopefully, however, as Collins presents his own mythic analogue of the Spenserian girdle, "the cest of amplest power," the goddess Fancy's gift to the blest or worthy poet: Young Fancy thus, to me divinest name, To whom, prepared and bathed in heaven, • The cest of amplest power is given, To few the godlike gift assigns To gird their blest prophetic loins, And gaze her visions wild, and feel unmixed her flame! (17-22) Collins' muse, divinest Fancy, is to be distinguished from the loveliest Elfin Queen (1. 4) who presides over the school of Spenser. For Fancy's elect, the poetical and prophetic spirits are one, her gift entitling her devotees to heavenly visions and a divine capacity for unmediated feeling. One can assume, accordingly, that the pain and humiliation of the unregenerate who seek this high office will be even more terrible than the agony endured by failed romance poets. The strophe, then, differentiates two classes of poetry: the lovely poetry of chivalric romance and the divinely inspired poetry of prophetic vision. I am persuaded that Collins is delimiting two major categories of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, the Beautiful and Sublime modes, the representative of the former (relaxed, mild, outwardgoing) Spenser and of the latter (nervous, stern, inwardturning) Milton. This discrimination of modes is adumbrated by Collins some years earlier in the preface to the Persian Eclogues. He begins by honoring the popular assumption of the relationship between climatic influence and the genius of a nation, adding that "the style of my countrymen is as naturally strong and nervous as that of an Arabian or Persian is rich and figurative. There is an elegancy and wildness of thought which recommends all their compositions; and our geniuses are as much too cold for the entertainment of such sentiments as our climate is for their fruits and spices." Insofar as Spenser and Milton are bold and fanciful poets, they are Eastern poets to Collins, poets close to the originative sources of

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The "Ode on the Poetical Character"

imagination—close to the sun. Yet certain distinctions can be made. Spenser is frequently condemned for "carelessness" by even his most sympathetic eighteenth-century commentators and is thus likely to attract their "light regard." To them he is chiefly a poet of luxurious expansiveness, the sort Collins associates with the Persian or Arabian genius.4 Milton's poetry, on the other hand, is more congenial to another species of the Eastern genius, the Hebraic. Robert Lowth, lecturing at Oxford during the years of Collins' residence, thus contrasts the manner of the Hebrew poets and other Orientals: "In the very parts in which other poets are copious and diffuse, the Hebrews, on the contrary, are brief, energetic, and animated; not gliding along in a smooth and equal stream, but with the inequality and impetuosity of a torrent." 5 Does not this Hebraic style, at once sinewy and metaphorical, represent a fusion of the Northern strength and Oriental richness described in the preface to the Eclogues ? And does not the mature poetry of Milton represent the most ambitious attempt to marry the vigor of the North and the copiousness of the East in English poetry? Some such wedding of Eastern fancy and English strength, I would add, ever remains Collins' fondest dream. I have yet to account for much of the Miltonic presence in the strophe. In the first two stanzas the prothalamic voice of the younger Milton surfaces in the phrases "love-darting eye" (1. 8), appropriated from Comus' seduction speech to the Lady, and "angel-friend to virgin fame" (1. 11), which recalls the Attendant Spirit. Of greater significance, however, is that the contrast of Fancy with the elfin muse of romance poetry draws upon Milton's opposition of his own divine Urania to the lesser muse courted by those who sing of "Bases and tinsel Trappings, gorgeous Knights / At Joust and Tournament" (PL.IX.36-37). 6 Noting this similarity, Earl R. Wasserman traces the comparison of muses in Milton and Collins to the medieval topos of the terrestrial and heavenly Venuses.7 But much more important to Collins is a particular passage in Milton's prose which seems to be guiding him throughout the ode. I refer to the autobiographical section of An Apology for Smectymnuus in which Milton rehearses his vocational progress by way of a chronicle of the readings which helped to raise his mind from earthly to heavenly imaginings. As in the strophe of the "Ode to the Poetical Character," Milton's subject is chastity, specifically the continuity between his developing esteem for personal chastity and the growth of his own poetical genius. He offers a literary progress in little, recounting the several stages of his youthful studies: from the elegiac Latin poets who awaken him to a consciousness of his own expressive power and quicken his love of the virtuous life; to Dante and Petrarch, who are more answerable to his own chaster ideal, and who send him to the solemn cantos

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of chivalric romance; to the sublime mysteries of the philosophers, who in turn inspire an appetite for virtue that can be satisfied only by the Bible, which is where his quest ends. This graduated progress from aesthetic, to ethical, to religious dedication, then, reflects Milton's conception of his own development, each phase of his past history now reinterpreted within the context of a providential unfolding of his genius. That Providence should befriend him is due, he believes, to his unswerving devotion to the sage and serious doctrine of chastity: "If I should tell ye what I learnt of chastity and love, I mean that which is truly so, whose charming cup is only virtue, which she bears in her hand to those who are worthy; (the rest are cheated with a thick intoxicating potion, which a certain sorceress, the abuser of love's name, carries about;) . . . With such abstracted sublimities as these, it might be worth your listening, readers, as I may one day hope to have ye." 8 This sounds very much like the Lady of Comus (or Christ's), and is directly relevant to Collins' ode. Poetry's elect are blessed in accordance with the strict blamelessness of their lives; their special (hymeneal) reward is the power of harmony (haemony). In a larger sense, this is the great theme of all Milton's poetry—chastity understood as well-governed appetite, harmony as the convergence of natural and supernatural powers in one who dedicates his life to the struggle for self-discipline. Chastity for Milton is the soul of harmony, and virtue is power. The poet who unchains such power, moreover, must himself be a harmonious vision, "a true poem." 9 Yet, as Milton writes elsewhere, harmonious vision is "the inspired gift of God rarely bestowed." 10 The poet who is not a sublime poem is cheated with a thick Circean draught. No wonder Collins is so fearful and so awed by his vocation. In the mesode Collins sets out to prove himself worthy of joining Fancy's laureate band, again charting a developmental arc from pleasurable to arduous vision. And again Spenser is his starting point. Having mentioned the virtue of Florimel's girdle, Spenser continues with a little myth tracing its origins as a gift from Vulcan to Venus and explaining how Florimel happened to come upon it while Venus was entertaining Mars in her bower. Collins, too, invents a genealogical myth for the cest of amplest power (Spenser prefaces his remarks with "as Fairies wont report," Collins with "as fairy legends say"), but his is markedly different. The weaving of Fancy's girdle is an outgrowth of the most momentous of mythic stories: that of the simultaneous genesis of the physical and imaginative universes. It is as though Collins were seeking to work through Spenser to Milton in the mesode, advancing from the beauties of a happy garden world, to a realm in which Beautiful and

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The "Ode on the Poetical Character"

Sublime (Fancy and the Creator) are wedded, as in Spenser's greatest visions, to the apocalyptic moment when the "rich-haired youth of morn" emerges, in whose person Beautiful and Sublime are not simply wedded but identified, all distinctions being transcended and annulled. Until the final questions, the verse of the mesode is remarkably exuberant, signaling that imagination in fact, as well as in theme, is taking over. The opening lines, The band, as fairy legends say, Was wove on that creating day When He, who called with thought to birth Yon tented sky, this laughing earth, And dressed with springs and forests tall, And poured the main engirting all, (23-28) indicate the recovery of a naiveté and joy reminiscent of "L'Allegro." Earth in her glad attire, the waters embracing the land—the sheer volatile motion of the scene effects a responsive sympathy in Collins' new emancipated style. In the subsequent lines Collins abandons himself to the rhythm of his story, mounting toward an incantatory style that freely mingles iambic and trochaic measures. Not only unself-conscious grace, but sublime tension attends his account of the coupling of Fancy and the Creator: Long by the loved Enthusiast wooed, Himself in some diviner mood, Retiring sat with her alone, And placed her on his sapphire throne, The whiles, the vaulted shrine around, Seraphic wires were heard to sound, Now sublimest triumph swelling, Now on love and mercy dwelling . . . (29-36) The ostensibly sexual tenor of this union, beside pointing to a heightened or "diviner" exercise of the Almighty's creative faculties, reflects a new order of visionary perception on Collins' part. He is not writing a calculating, tepid allegory resolvable into the equation Thought+Fancy=Creation, and if the lines retain an allegorical tincture, it is as allegory wooed toward the greater intensity of mythic discourse. It is this intensity, the freely affirmative quality of the verse, rather than the meaning that I would emphasize at this juncture. It seems to me that Collins stands apart from Milton here in a very important way. So intent

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is Milton on intellectualizing his faith that he skirts disaster in Book VII of Paradise Lost. Recounting the rationale for creation and retiring to the solitude of his cloudy tabernacle, God serves as a commentator, a principle of logic or remote science who ideates but never directly participates the universal celebration of genesis. Collins, however, does not estrange the Father from his Word. He manages a daring revision of the often unspirited Son—"love and mercy" (1. 36)—as Fancy, the feminine principle in creation, a kindred power to Heaven who is a true embodiment of that power in action which is the life-giving Word. Logos, not logic, is what moves Collins in Milton, and something of the magnificent excess of Milton's grand theogony is recaptured by Collins, the Word concurrently impregnating primal matter and wooing the Father toward his joyous task. Yet if he too often countenances the lapse of the Father into Urizenic frigidity, the essential bias of Milton's nature is anything but ascetic. In Tetrachordon, for example, he writes that "God himself conceals not his own recreations before the world was built: 'I was,' saith the Eternal Wisdom, 'daily his delight, playing always before him.' "11 A like amorous spirit prevails in the invocation to Urania in Book VII of Paradise Lost, where the muse is said to have entertained the Almighty with joyous pastime prior to the Creation. Milton does not scruple to court the (nightly) visitation of that same goddess: the spirit who presided over the Creation must also preside over the creation of Milton's poem. It is not difficult to see why Collins is attracted by the Miltonic precedent. For in this, his most ambitious poem, he wishes to summon a similar sublime audacity in recommending to his contemporaries a vision of how much "higher far descended" the poetical character is than they believe. It will not do to reduce Fancy to Milton's Urania; she is the active principle in creation, by whatever name one chooses to call it. To be distinguished from Milton's notion of Fancy as a purveyor of errant dream-work, Collins' Fancy is anticipated by what Raphael calls "intuitive" reason (V.488). Intuition, according to Raphael, is fundamentally an angelic attribute, man generally relying upon discursive reason. 12 Yet there is no mistaking the likeness between this angelic intelligence and the visionary power sought by Milton himself, the Inner Light which renders the spirit transparent to itself and so gives it access to "things invisible to mortal sight." Raphael, divine herald, interprets Milton's prophetic role. Milton thus defines the priestly role in Animadversions: "To be a messenger and herald of heavenly truth from God to man, and, by the faithful work of holy doctrine, to procreate a number of faithful men, making a creation like to God's. . . . arising to what climate soever he turn him, like that Sun of Righteousness that sent him, with healing in his wings . . .

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The "Ode on the Poetical Character"

raising out of darksome barrenness a delicious and fragrant spring of saving knowledge." 13 Having sailed down from Heaven's Gate to Paradise, when he alights Raphael's wings dispense a balmy fragrance; but sweeter to Adam are his healing words. Indeed, Adam is so charmed by Raphael's discourse that even after the account of Creation is concluded he nevertheless hears, or dreams he hears, the angelic voice. And cannot we discover Milton listening here to his own voice, the natural man in him lingering upon the echo of his charming divine philosophy? Collins, too, is charmed. I would urge a recognition of his alliance with Milton because it seems to me that Milton's faith in the pure and undivided consciousness of the prophetic artist is revived—with a fine repetition—in Collins' ode. Collins aspires to be numbered among Fancy's elect, to have her girdle his loins with the cest of amplest power, "to gaze her visions wild, and feel unmixed her flame." One recalls Raphael's account of angelic sexual union: Easier than Air with Air, if Spirits embrace, Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure Desiring; nor restrain'd conveyance need As Flesh to mix with Flesh, or Soul with Soul. (VIII.626-629) Not only does Collins express a desire for such a union with his muse at the end of the strophe, but it is through such a union of pure with pure that the rich-haired youth of morn springs to birth in the mesode. Here, in blazing form, that unmixed flame Collins longs to embrace emerges, a sole ethereal power not unlike the Father who sends him forth. It is Fancy, however, who immediately initiates his emergence. Amidst the jubilation of celestial choirs, she literally inspires him, singing him into birth: And she, from out the veiling cloud, Breathed her magic notes aloud: And thou, thou rich-haired youth of morn, And all thy subject life was born! (37-40) Even in a poem of such immense vitalism, this is an exceptional moment. It is as though, at line 39, Collins were caught off guard, an extraordinary tension finding release, as by an unanticipated, spontaneous transcendence. This turn (and deepening) of the verse is as much a verbal as an emotional phenomenon. The final line above marks the first terminal articulation of the mesode, the preceding lines a series of mounting sub-

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ordinate clauses that gather in rhythmic and phrasal intensity, especially after line 29. At once nervous and syntactically fluid, the description of the union of Fancy and the Creator combines something of the richness of the Miltonic high style with the upbeat style of "L'Allegro." The tightening effect of an elevated, Latinate diction constrained by endstopped tetrameters is thus relieved in part by a peripatetic rhythm freely organizing its periods. As line 39 approaches, however, the movement is slowed, the verbal energy more highly concentrated. The repetition of the personal pronoun and the succession of monosyllables and packed open vowels attest to a mind colliding unself-consciously with a new and deepening sight (or insight). A curious fact may be noted. The previous trochaic line (anticipated by lines 35-36) remains the only seven-syllable line of the mesode. An expectation is unfulfilled; a verbal space would yet be filled. The effect, though probably unintentional, is as a breathing space, an absolute moment in the text during which the mind is powerfully distracted and drawn toward a transfiguring recognition. Indeed, because of the explicitly religious tone of Collins' language heretofore, we sense the pressure of a sacred event determining this hiatus. Line 39 resolves the pressure, suggesting not only the liberty of a cathartic release but a movement in consciousness emanating from an invisible source—as mystery is usurped by a still greater mystery. Under the impact of the luminous vision of the rich-haired youth of morn, the verse abruptly opens up, as the speaker is overwhelmed by this sudden manifestation of the immanent splendor of creation. The space between absence and presence, however, remains unworded, the ineffable source of generation unprofaned. Yet it is precisely within, or out of, this inexpressive breathing space that glory dawns. Coincident with this dawning image, Collins is moved to theophanic utterance, the insistent thou-address of Sublime rhetoric employed for the only time in the poem. It is not, however, the mere use of the secondperson invocatory address which is significant—it had, after all, served a promiscuous brood of Cowleyan rhapsodists as a pro forma device for effecting the mechanical elevation of the spirit—but the urgency with which Collins reinvests the traditional form. Here, if nowhere else in the Greater Odes of the century, one discovers a realization of the theoretical cliché that the engenderment of personifications (the "thou" figures of allegorical poetry) is a sublime activity. Yet why become so excited about the rich-haired youth of morn? No answer is readily forthcoming if one agrees with those who claim that the phrase is simply a periphrasis for the sun 14 and not a reference to the ever-young Apollo, god of the sun and god of poetry. 15 Why should the sun's creation occupy the central position in the central section of an ode

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on the poetical character? And why should Collins insist on this particular genealogy for the sun? It is true that the Creator may be viewed as a type of the Poet, fashioning the world through the agency of his Fancy; yet it is also true that Fancy is an independent agent, Collins' own muse, the bearer of the sacred poetic girdle. The mesode begins with a reference to the girdle ("The band . . ./was wove on that creating day . . ."), and as soon as Collins concludes his apostrophe to the rich-haired youth of morn the weaving of the cest commences. Clearly it is the appropriate garb of Fancy's child, the Poet proper. Collins is more radical than this, however. The woven band is a text (textus), the archetypal poet is a poem of Fancy, and the various powers introduced in lines 4 1 - 5 0 are a responsive audience. The crucial point, in any event, is that to Collins both sun and poet are luminaries, the figure wavering between descriptive and mythopoeic status. If the rich-haired youth is a prosopopoeia corresponding to the light of the morning (i.e., the sun), he is in addition an emblem of light itself, a principle of radiance whose very excess dissolves the boundaries between natural, human, and divine orders of being. In the invocation to Book 111 of Paradise Lost Milton, similarly, hails a power of transcendent brightness. Cut off from the natural light of the sun, he calls forth a more generous saving light (like Collins' youth, "offspring of Heav'n first-born"), seeking a compensatory gift of inward illumination that will infuse the mind with divine power. Despite abundant theological precedent, the prayer is stunningly audacious: Milton asks for a marriage of divine light and the light of nature, a reintegration of human and divine faculties such as existed before the Fall. As a fallen man, Milton must pray for heavenly assistance, but he welcomes the spirit of God into the interior temple of his own upright heart and pure, and at line 51 he issues less an appeal than an injunction. To apprehend the spiritual form of such a being we should look to the vision of a rejuvenated Albion evoked in this unmistakably right-handed passage from Areopagitica: "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks: methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unscaling her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance." 16 Like the phoenix-angel Raphael, this mighty phoenix-nation is subsumed by the figure of Milton the phoenix-poet. Milton, of course, was too much a Christian—indeed, perhaps too wise a man—to acknowledge the kind of associations here being wrested from his work. An even more outrageously apocalyptic humanist, Blake, best captures the inner division between the historical and eternal Milton:

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God Appears & God is Light To those poor Souls who dwell in Night But does a Human Form Display To those who Dwell in Realms of Day. 17 Like Blake, Collins seizes upon the inmost spiritual form—the Human Form Divine—in his projection of imagination's glad day. If not reducible to Blake's eternal Milton, Collins' youth displays the dazzling outward form of the inward luminary who bursts through the veil of natural darkness in the invocation to Book III. For as the Light Milton invokes is equivalent to the creating Word, so in Collins light and wording are inseparably joined. Poetry is coeval with Creation, the poet a central luminary to whom all other created forms repair, as to a fountain of radiance. In stanza 1 of the "Ode to Liberty" Collins asks: What new Alcaeus, Fancy-blest, Shall sing the sword in myrtles dressed, At Wisdom's shrine awhile its flame concealing, (What place so fit to seal a deed renowned?) Till she her brightest lightnings round revealing, It leaped in glory forth and dealt her prompted wound! (7-12) A glorious sun is springing out of this flaming brand, its dawning contingent upon the reemergence of a poet with the daring of those rich-haired youths (1. 3) who graced the liberated world of ancient Greece. The epithet "Fancy-blest" enforces the parallel between the two odes, as does the likeness between the tenor of Collins' question here and those which terminate the mesode of the "Ode on the Poetical Character": Where is the bard, whose soul can now Its high presuming hopes avow? Where he who thinks, with rapture blind, This hallowed work for him designed? (51-54) Again Collins asks whether any poet can now summon sufficient imaginative strength to bestir the English lyre, thus earning Fancy's girdle of prophecy. To do so would be to incarnate the sun: in other words, to identify himself with (or as) the rich-haired youth of morn. What distinguishes the "Ode on the Poetical Character" from the "Ode to Liberty" is that the experience of inner conversion, or incarnation of the poetical character, is intimated prior to the thematic aware-

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ness of its possibility at the conclusion of the mesode. The fine suddenness with which Collins' mind turns round at the spectacle of the visionary sun-as-poet—"And thou, thou rich-haired youth of morn"—is the moment of incarnation, the spirit of the poet merging with the self of his desire through the mediation of the poetic act. Much of the rapt excitement of the previous verses derives from the pains, the rhythm, and the joy of the birth Collins is able to win for himself, the sexual energy of this difficult birth, as in Milton, taken up unself-consciously into the greater energy of imagination. As a more reflective stage of consciousness succeeds Collins' dawning epiphany, he is, as it were, halted upon the wing, relaxing into a comparatively temperate allegory as the cest is woven and then confronting himself with the final, nervous questions. His anxiety prefigures the retreat from vision in the antistrophe, and the "rapture blind," which points directly to Milton, helps account for Collins' perplexity. For Milton has eclipsed the sun. The antistrophe opens suddenly upon a scene charged with a strange and fearful beauty, and Collins adopts a harsher style to recount a perilous ascent toward his ghostly father: High on some cliff to Heaven up-piled 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 glooms embrown, its springs unlock, While on its rich ambitious head, An Eden, like his own, lies spread . . . (55-62) This magic mountain is the mountain of the human body, of the imagination locked into the natural and imbuing it with life. It is also the "grotesque and wild" steep Milton struggles to climb in Paradise Lost, at whose summit Eden lies (IV.132-145). But more than the "Rock/ Of Alabaster, pil'd up to the Clouds" (IV.543-544) of Milton's epic, Collins' mountain is a phantasmagoric projection of the Miltonic legacy itself. It is the mountain of Milton's poetry, particularly Paradise Lost, sacred place and sacred text converging in this remarkable image of the winding stairway all post-Miltonic poets must scale as they strive for vision. The way upward, moreover, is the way inward, and this shadowy ground—at once sacred and purgatorial zone—is as elusive and ambiva-

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lent as the human psyche. The holy genii who are the "eyes" of the mountain are of particular interest. If they recall the "Genius of the shore" in "Lycidas," consecrated as the guide and guardian of all future wanderers in the perilous flood, there is also an allusion to those dreadful cherubim sent to guard the Tree of Life after the Fall. In Ezekiel they become the Covering Cherub, a demonic guardian of God's Holy Mountain. In Blake's Milton the Covering Cherub is identified with "Milton's Shadow" (plate 37). According to Bloom, "Milton's Shadow here partly means his influence upon later poets, for his Shadow, in being identified with the Covering Cherub, becomes one with everything in the fallen world that blocks imaginative redemption. Milton too is a guardian of the truth who has become, in spite of himself, an anxietyprinciple or demonic agent." Guarding the sources of imaginative renewal after the writing of Paradise Lost, Collins' mountain genii are emblems of what Bloom terms "the negative or stifling aspect of poetic influence."18 Yet although they are jealous, covering spirits who embrown the mountain's glooms, they are also the unlockers of its sacred springs. The possibility of generous mediation is thus retained, and it is this bivalence which allows an interpretation of the mountain of the antistrophe as the mountain of poetic influence. At the summit of this mountain Collins envisions Milton reclining amid his own Paradise: I view that oak, the fancied glades among, By which as Milton lay, his evening ear, From many a cloud that dropped ethereal dew, Nigh sphered in heaven its native strains could hear: On which that ancient trump he reached was hung . . . (63-67) Awakening into Paradise, Adam is soon discontented, questioning God: "In solitude / What happiness, who can enjoy alone, / Or all enjoying, what contentment find?" (VIII.364-366). But Collins' Adamic Milton is a splendid solitary of the kind we encounter in the great invocations of Paradise Lost, unmindful of human converse because his inspiration is divine. Indeed, Milton here is what Adam might have become in time had there been no restlessness in Paradise, no Eve, no Fall: an undivided being at the human summit whose faculties are so thoroughly inured to heavenly converse that he is, in effect, a god. Any number of Miltonic contexts are suggested by Collins' portrait, but perhaps most telling is the following passage from the Genius of the Wood's address in "Arcades":

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. . . when drowsiness Hath lockt up mortal sense, then listen I To the celestial Sirens' harmony, That sit upon the nine infolded Spheres And sing to those that hold the vital shears And turn the Adamantine spindle round, On which the fate of gods and men is wound. Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie, To lull the daughters of Necessity, And keep unsteady Nature to her law, And the low world in measur'd motion draw After the heavenly tune, which none can hear Of mortal mold with gross unpurged ear. (61-73) Attuned to the soul of harmony, the magian poet is released from human infirmity (the Adam-antine spindle), his special privilege the ability to sing away all mortal fears, perhaps even death itself. If this fond Arcadian dream is largely submerged by the deepening gloom of much of Milton's later verse, its appeal is never extinguished. For all his scruples, Milton is still to conceive the power of harmony as a means of personal salvation and of access to Heaven. Entranced by this aural fantasy, Milton's eighteenth-century progeny—Young, Thomson, Akenside, the Wartons, Collins, to name a few—are ever eager to hear keener sounds. Could they but wean themselves from the tyranny of the unquiet eye, they might realize something akin to the assurance of a Miltonic ideal blindness. By developing prodigious powers of audition, capable of abolishing all distances, the poet might yet be allowed an unmediated experience of Heaven's native strains. Milton's "evening ear" in line 64 is a case in point. Patricia Meyer Spacks, generally a sensitive critic, writes, "one can hardly believe that Collins wished to place special stress on . . . Ear."19 Yet this is precisely what he wants. The emphatic positioning of "ear" is decidedly Miltonic: in "Lycidas," one recalls, the blasting effect of mortal consciousness is associated with a "loss to Shepherd's ear" (1. 49). Collins' peculiar, even surreal image is almost a literalization of the Attendant Spirit's " I was all ear" (Comus, 1. 560) and is expressive of a fine imaginative insight. For Milton's is supremely a poetry of the ear. Whether strained to the heights of the terrible Sublime or accommodated to the more errant modulations of a human time and space, his genius characteristically insinuates itself through a power that is in essence vocal, not to say vocative. With Milton, as with the Hebrew nabi, prophecy is logocentric, the evocation

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of "visionary sound." 20 Hence, the aptness of Collins' portrait. No disengaged neoclassical prospect-poet, his Milton is blinded to external forms. The ear becomes, necessarily, the vehicle of revelation. Yet not simply the ear: rather an ear purged and chastened by heavenly colloquy, the ear-within-an-ear through which Milton received the promptings of his muse, the internal organ by means of which the mind hears, and sees, and knows itself divine. Listening to his own "native strains," Collins' Milton is charmed by his own poetry, a perfect echo of the heavenly diapason. The most striking parallel in Milton is the account of the angelic counterpart of the Music of the Spheres in Book V of Paradise Lost, to which "God's own ear/Listens delighted" (11. 626—627). Yet, although displaying a profound grasp of the Miltonic genius, Collins betrays an equally profound estrangement from the figure he presents. A ghostly figure indeed, it is not even certain whether Collins actually beholds Milton at all. When he begins " I view that oak . . .," he may mean that the oak is all he views, both Milton and the trump of prophecy simply its imagined concomitants. There is also a delicate hesitancy about the juxtaposition of "view" and "fancied" in line 63. Are the glades "fancied," and therefore unreal, because now beheld in vision, or are they so called because dear to Fancy? And what of "its" in line 66} While perhaps referring to "heaven," the preceding word, "its" may well point back to "evening ear." One thing, however, is clear. Whereas Milton is a figure superbly relaxed and at one with himself, Collins is distinguished by the exceptional labor and perplexity of his syntax. Directly confronting Milton for the only time in the ode—in fact, in all his poetry—Collins' palpable discomfort is evidenced by an evasive syntax that circles around the portrait of Milton in lines 6 4 - 6 6 in a startling way: I view the oak . . . on which that trump he reached was hung. Milton is veiled, as though too holy a being to picture directly. Another significant feature of Collins' vision is that in his encounter with Milton he separates out the Beautiful and the Sublime. The representation of the setting sun in the "Ode to Evening," . . . while now the bright-haired sun Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts, With brede ethereal wove O'erhang his wavy bed, (5-8) provides an intriguing analogue to the recumbent Milton of the "Ode on the Poetical Character." As the supreme embodiment of the divine poet in the ode, Milton is a type of the rich-haired youth of morn, who now discovers his most authentic historical incarnation. Yet instead of a

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dawning image, Collins presents Milton in the context of a sun that is setting. "Lycidas," similarly, concludes with a twilight scene. But there, at the very moment the sun drops into the Western bay, Milton cunningly declares the emergence of a new and greater sun: "at last he rose" to commence his visionary exploits. Milton has internalized the sun. For Collins, however, the sun is setting. Relegating Miltonic Sublimity to the prophetic emblems, trump and oak, he concentrates on what is mildest in Milton's experience. Yet it is the mildness of a powerful figure waiting in might. A latter-day Moses who is "afraid because of the fire," Collins shrinks from the heat of the sun, as in the "Ode to Evening" he retreats from the cold of winter, seeking a more temperate mental clime. As so often in his poetry, the encounter with Milton results in an unrest serving as an invitation to repose. Estranged from his visionary intensity in the mesode, Collins is left to read his own lost ecstasy in Milton's dreamy sleep, vicariously imagining what Milton experiences directly. The pathos of the conclusion does not come as a surprise: Thither oft his glory greeting From Waller's myrtle shades retreating, With many a vow from hope's aspiring tongue, My trembling feet his guiding steps pursue: In vain—such bliss to one alone Of all the sons of soul was known, And Heaven and Fancy, kindred powers, Have now o'erturned the inspiring bowers, Or curtained close such scene from every future view. (68-76) Just as Collins spurns the "shades" of Waller and his Augustan school, so does Milton in "Lycidas" reject those who "sport with Amaryllis in the shade" (1. 68). Milton is confronting the problem of nature's indifference, or hostility, to imaginative endeavor: But the fair Guerdon when we hope to find, And think to burst out into sudden blaze, Comes the blind Fury with th' abhorred shears, And slits the thin-spun life. (73-76) Consoled by Apollo, Milton continues to pursue his prize, and, as I have suggested, does "burst into sudden blaze" at the end of the poem. Yet Collins' cest of amplest power remains an elusive goal and Fancy a "thankless Muse" ("Lycidas," 1. 66). More pursued than pursuing, Collins discovers himself at the end of his poem as a being adrift, in self-exile

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from the accessible middle ground of the Augustans and cast out from the inspiring bowers of Milton's Poet's Paradise. The "many a vow from hope's aspiring tongue" (1. 70) are Collins' poems, the prayers for inspiration of which his poetry consists; and hence, what is expressed here with painful honesty is the determinate form of Collins' spiritual autobiography. One thinks of those other failed initiates, Adam and Eve. Having aspired to a divinity beyond their reach, they awaken from their heady dreams of power to recognize their essential weakness. Like Collins, they hide from the sun, and dimmed by the spiritual darkness of the Fall, their eyes cannot make out the forms of Michael and the cherubic watch descending to Paradise. Later, when Michael informs them that they must leave the garden, they are, quite naturally, appalled. Unwilling to relinquish the ground where God had often visited them, Adam responds: "In yonder nether World where shall I see/His bright appearances, or footsteps trace?" (XI.328-329). Michael replies by way of reminding him of God's omnipresence. But further on, at the summit of the Mount of Speculation, when Adam expresses horror at the Flood, Michael's reply is ferocious: . . . then shall this Mount Of Paradise by might of Waves be mov'd Out of this place, push'd by the horned flood, With all his verdure spoil'd, and Trees adrift Down the great River to the op'ning Gulf, And there take root an Island salt and bare, The haunt of Seals and Orcs, and Sea-mews' clang. To teach thee that God áttributes to place No sanctity, if none be thither brought By men who there frequent, or therein dwell. (XI.829-838) Collins, who echoes Adam's complaint in the antistrophe, knows nothing of this fearful consolation. To him the fall from paradise is absolute, and in this he differs markedly from his great precursor. In Paradise Lost Milton also agonizes over the possibility that the sources of imaginative and spiritual redemption may be "curtained close." His admonitory response to this dread is to be found in Michael's various sermons to Adam in Books XI and XII. Yet more important than these declarations is the example of the poet himself. For it is only the power of Milton's own imagination—risen out of the darkness of the fallen corporeal understanding—that gives credence to Michael's doctrine of the "Paradise within." Moreover, Milton's trust in God was such

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that he could resolve, not without pain, to live the humble life. This is the way of the latter books of Paradise Lost and of Paradise Regained. Here the imaginative man chooses exile from his own imaginative strength, turning to a middle ground of purgatorial endeavor in which heroic themes are forsaken for the trials of a more ordinary and perhaps therefore more difficult heroism. Collins, on the other hand, cannot accept his precarious situation. Unlike Keats in The Fall of Hyperion, who draws poetic life from what is left of the food and drink in Milton's paradise and so can undertake his own purgatorial trials, Collins is repelled by the alien soil and has nowhere to turn, perhaps because he cannot conceive a poetry unlike Milton's which is worthy of his labor. Mistaking virginity for chastity, he laments that one alone can ever know true bliss, perversely reading Milton's description of the Mount of Paradise: . . . it was a Rock Of Alabaster, pil'd up to the Clouds, Conspicuous far, winding with one ascent Accessible from Earth, one entrance high. (IV.543-546) Collins' imaginative error, to paraphrase Michael, lies in attaching sanctity to place and to person, in locating Milton's poetry as a sacred precinct and in idolatrously viewing Milton as the ultimate incarnation of the poetical character. To have read Milton aright would have been to realize, or at least assert in the face of anxiety, that first is not necessarily best and that paradise may exist wherever poetry is written. But if Milton believes that the mind is its own place, so of course does Satan. Curiously, in the "Ode on the Poetical Character" Collins is less the spiritual heir of Milton than of Satan, Milton's own antiself and Bloom's archetype of the latecomer poet. 21 This is not to say that there is an exact correspondence between Collins' and the Satanic torment, or that I am assuming a recognition of the parallel on Collins' part. The similarities, however, are close enough to warrant careful attention and to suggest that Collins is repressing a fearful knowledge: is it the knowledge of his own belatedness or, more likely, the guilt of daring to assert his own birthright as a son of Fancy in Milton's presence? After completing his journey through Chaos, Satan begins his career in the realms of light when the sun allures his eye. A sun-spot, he alights on the fiery orb and encounters its regent, the glorious rich-haired angel Uriel (II 1.623—628). From here Satan descends to Eden, proceeding to the Mount of Paradise, which is at this point protected by an angelic host

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sent by God to guard against Satan's approach. Later, in Book IV, he enters the garden and beholds Adam and Eve in their bower. The sight of these happy beings fills him with envy; their paradise is his hell: "the more I see / Pleasure about me, so much the more I feel / Torment within me, as from the hateful siege / Of contraries" (IX.119-122). The air of Eden, we recall, is "able to drive / All sadness but despair" (IV.155-156), and Satan is the very type of Despair. Like Spenser's Despair, Collins is a spiritual Calvinist in the ode, believing that there is a poetic elite and that he is unworthy to join it. In Paradise Lost Satan and the other rebel angels have every reason to consider themselves damned, a fact brought home by their tendency to ascribe their downfall to Fate, Necessity, Universal Law. In short, we know they are historical determinists, not simply because of their condition as inhabitants of Hell, but because of the unerring accuracy with which Milton renders the hellish consciousness: "Nor is it distance of place that makes enmity, but enmity that makes distance." 22 Belial, for instance, is a prefiguration of the spirit known to Blake as the Spectre, a spirit of passivity who would accede to his fallen state, accommodate himself to the flames of Hell, arguing against action because "the Tow'rs of Heav'n are fill'd / With Armed watch that render all access/ Impregnable" (11.129-131). Blake would doubtless regard the "Ode on the Poetical Character" as a production of the spectral consciousness. For Collins is a man obsessed by his own damnation, choosing to accept his lot as a fallen creature instead of initiating an action within himself to countervail his despair of limitation. More than damned, he is impure. One recollects the pervasive concern with worthiness and blessing in the strophe, as well as the typically Miltonic passages from the Apology and "Arcades" in which poetic talent is directly linked to spiritual purity. The sacred precinct will not abide profanation, the unworthy ejected from that ground which knows "No gross, no unharmonious mixture" (PL.X.51). Collins' peculiarly perverse variation on the idea of contagion is to equate it with belatedness. Insofar as Milton has already occupied the sublime heights of poetic achievement, all post-Miltonic generations are necessarily unblessed, dishonored, confounded. Similarly confounded, Satan falls by virtue of his "ambitious aim" to usurp the Mount of God: . . . aspiring To set himself in Glory above his Peers, He trusted to have equall'd the most High. (1.38-40)

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In Collins' case, we may gloss "his Peers" as the school of Waller and "the most High" as Milton. The analogy, however, extends beyond this facile correspondence. Milton is concerned to designate the "official" explanation of the Fall in the above passage, but his imagination discloses quite another account of Satan's fall into self-alienation, more persuasive than any doctrinal one could ever be. Why does Satan fall? The portress of Hell's Gate may supply the key. Intercepted by Sin on his upward flight out of Hell, Satan at first does not recognize his bride and daughter. She replies: Hast thou forgot me then, and do I seem Now in thine eye so foul, once deem'd so fair In Heav'n, when at th' Assembly, and in sight Of all the Seraphim with thee combin'd In bold conspiracy against Heav'n's King, All on a sudden miserable pain Surpris'd thee, dim thine eyes, and dizzy swum In darkness, while thy head flames thick and fast Threw forth, till on the left side op'ning wide, Likest to thee in shape and count'nance bright, Then shining heav'nly fair, a Goddess arm'd Out of thy head I sprung. (11.747-758) Satan is, quite literally, surprised by Sin. A topographer of the spirit, Milton delineates Satan's fall as originating in a catastrophe of mind. The mere act or fact of disobedience is relatively unimportant, 23 no more important, say, than the mythic story of Athena's birth, which is Milton's starting point. What alienates Satan from his former condition among the sons of light is, simply, a thought, a conception: "can it be sin to know,/ Can it be death?" (IV.517-518). Satan's thought is Sin, not merely sinful, and her conception is regarded in terms of an intellectual rape, her birth explicitly linked to a fearful discontinuity within the self. Beholding his perfect image in her countenance, Satan copulates with—or knows—his own Thought. Out of this fateful union Death emerges, "a growing burden" (11.767). Death's engenderment, moreover, seals the originative wound in consciousness, for during his gestation there is War in Heaven, the endless process of division that is death now commencing. Why should Satan conceive Sin in the first place? His enmity toward God is coterminous with the exaltation of the Son, and we may surmise that prior to God's determination Satan had participated unquestioningly in the ideal reciprocity of heavenly existence, in which "a grateful mind / By owing owes not, but still pays, at once/ Indebted and discharg'd: what

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burden then?" (IV.55-57). Satan's primal simplicity of self is lost, however, when God declares his Son "My only Son" (V.604) and appoints him head of the angelic host. The Son is properly viewed as the express image of God, the effluence of God's insufferable brightness. He is the active agent of God, and as such is the creator of Heaven and the angels. Satan, it can be said, errs in misreading God: for him the Son is a representation instead of a perfect repetition of God, a sign of God's absence, a thing instead of a creative process. Apprehending the Son as a reified entity intervening between God's presence and himself, Satan divides spirit and form and is thus trapped in a terrible dualism, the obverse of angelic intuitive reason or angelic sexuality as described by Raphael. He tries to overcome this inner division— the gap opened up in his mind between God and the Son and between God and himself—by denying God, and so his own creatureliness. He, too, can be creative, even self-creative. He engenders his own reflexive self, Sin, and impregnates her. The problem, however, is that Sin is a token of his dualistic consciousness, his love of his own Thought. His drive toward wholeness is baffled because he is trapped in the circle of solipsism, and instead of overcoming dualism he extends it. Indeed, Satan's emanative self is so much an Other that when intercepted by her at Hell's Gate, he cannot recollect having seen her before. He is surprised by this uncanny projection of what he had repressed when God declared Himself the only true creator. Nor can he recognize Death, that "darkness visible" which is his own creation. Committed to a Universe of Death, the Hell of Being Satan which his lust for knowing engenders, Satan can only miscreate or uncreate. Authentic self-knowledge, Milton reminds us, is twinned with Right Reason, and in Milton's universe that means recognizing one's dependence, or proper relationship to God. The "Ode on the Poetical Character" rehearses a similar catastrophe of mind. The apogee of Collins' experience is the rapturous vision of the rich-haired youth of morn in the mesode. An excess not to be reduced, this glorious spectacle implicates him in the peculiar tension of an I-Thou relationship: so deeply is he moved by the immanent splendor of this mystery that it is impossible to tell whether his excitement is generated by the spectacle or by his own self-generating power. Collins, however, cannot sustain his rapt intensity for long. Unable to tolerate mystery as mystery, he lapses into the troubling reductionism of the antistrophe, where Milton becomes a personification of the rich-haired youth of morn, an imaginative truth now discovering its shadowy, historical type. It would appear, then, that what Collins had celebrated in the mesode was a prophecy of Milton's rather than his own incarnation of the poetical character. What had been inside Collins, the influx of absolute

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power, is now outside him, lodged in the person of Milton. Collins' original muse, Fancy or the principle of imaginative creation, has been exchanged for Milton: a masculine muse intervening between Collins and Fancy, a giant of the imagination who neither needs nor courts successors. Utterly estranged from his own desired self, Collins confronts his vision of the Poet proper as an Other which at once allures him and insures his own damnation. One thinks again of Satan's relationship to Sin, that first and most ominous of personifications. Fleeing a mysterious principle of transcendent brightness, Satan merges with Sin and propagates Death, himself reduced to the deathly status of a personification of Evil after he curses the sun upon Mount Niphates. Collins would likewise evade the burden of the mystery he encounters, and in so doing abandons himself to the withering experience of being-in-time. Like Satan's, his reductionism is indicative of an effort to come to terms with a personal torment, a lesion in the mind which grows the more one tries to rip it out. For although he conceives Milton as an unanswering beloved adversary, his fantasized version of Milton is clearly answerable to his own anxiety. The precursor becomes a pretext, a figure masking Collins' puzzling will to fail. The source, or more likely sources, of that cramping selflimitation lies beyond the purview of interpretation. But one thing is quite certain: Time is not Collins' ultimate antagonist, as he would have us believe. We shall see that there is scarcely an important poem of Collins which is not also a song of the Spectre. Ironically, what he really requires is Satan's Fire, that spiritual daring he prays for in the epigraph to the Odes of 1746, or at least the persistence of Satan who finally acknowledges Sin and Death and does what he can with them. Frozen into the mechanical habit of pursuing Milton's "guiding steps," Collins is a poet too much guided and not enough in the sun. His achievement, however, trails clouds of glory and would have me conclude with Isaiah's golden line: "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!"

3. Rapture and Purgatory Blind At the end of the mesode of the "Ode on the Poetical Character" Collins asks whether any poet can now presume to claim the cest of amplest power as his own: Where he who thinks, with rapture blind, This hallowed work for him designed? The question helps us to focus both the particular crisis of the ode and a major dilemma besetting all of Collins' writing. The most abrupt turns of the ode occur when the poet's mythopoeic flights are checked by an insistent, often anguished self-consciousness, when the pleasures of feeling or imagining are preempted by the burdens of reflection. Collins cannot think with rapture blind. Lacking a medium in which he can be habitually at home with his reflective consciousness, Collins is a poet continually in flight from the pains of thought, continually relapsing into this condition which is felt to be unbearable. Gray, perhaps more poignantly, confronts the same dilemma: Thought would destroy their paradise. No more; where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise. ("Eton Ode," 98-100) Reflection destroys our paradise, a moment's doubt that swells into a profound spiritual despair. To think is to be filled with that doubt which is a despair of thought; and to experience such despair is to know a still more desolating doubt of personality. Cast out of paradise, the poet becomes a gloomy imaginative pilgrim, fatally drawn to those scenes of ignorant bliss (real or imagined) which heighten his already morbid selfconsciousness. Yet knowledge was not necessarily sorrow for earlier poets, or at least rarely was it such a corrosive force. It is no secret that the vulnerability of Collins, Gray, and their contemporaries is allied to the cultural shock of the Enlightenment. The metaphor of the breaking of the circle, no matter how belabored, has considerable validity, especially if one respects its original, magical sense. The Enlightenment meant that the world had grown up and grown wise, but for the poets it was a sad maturity. It meant the loss of a universal feeling of relatedness to things, the cessation

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of the ancient oracles. 1 Whether we consider Hobbes's conversion of spiritual influences into the motions of Newtonian physics, the philosophers' reduction of genius to genus, or Warburton's (almost endearing) opinion that the metamorphosis of ships into sea-deities in The Aeneid argues for cultivating a naval power, we encounter a mode of thought with which every enlightened writer must contend. The magic circle—joining Self and World, Fancy and Reason, Heaven and Earth— now un-Locked, the poet who still cherishes the imaginative values of the past will need to discover some way to mediate this fearful division. Nevertheless, the quest for reintegration is imperiled in a bewildering variety of ways. Not the least of these difficulties is occasioned by the relativization of what had been traditional centers of power. The poet himself, once regarded as superior to time and place, is now increasingly understood as a product of his age and circumstances. 2 Thus, according to Blackwell, Homer's exalted position is owing to a peculiar convergence of superior talent and historical accident. The Homeric genius may seem magical, even divine, but its splendor is unthinkable outside the context of his ignorant age. The clear implication is that all claims for the privileged status of the inspired bard are merely inflated false surmise. Although the poets of the era are understandably less willing to demystify their vocation, their works testify to the impact of such attitudes. Collins can still assert that Heaven and Fancy are "kindred powers," but he fears that the magical potency of poetry's enchanted ground will be dispelled by his own necessarily enlightened mind. The dread of historical loss—of temporal declines and falls—is a disease of consciousness experienced by every poet of the age. The case of Dryden, that massive figurehead of confusion, is particularly instructive. Considering his relation to his literary fathers, Dryden thinks in catastrophic terms. In his epistle to Congreve he writes, "Theirs was the giant race, before the Flood." What has flooded in is classic judgment, "rules of husbandry"; ebbing out, however, is a glorious power of making: "what we gain'd in skill we lost in strength." Most startling about Dryden's conception of the past is that for him the writers of the "Last Age" are already Ancients, so radically disjoined are the spirits of the two eras. Yet the great anxiety underlying the unending neoclassical battle of Ancients and Moderns is that there is a continuity between the Ancients and Moderns—that since the present is simply an elaboration of the past, all that remains for the modern writer is ornamentation. Neander, Dryden's principal spokesman in An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, offers the following unhappy comparison of the present age and that of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans:

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Yet give me leave to say thus much, without injury to their ashes; that not only we shall never equal them, but they could never equal themselves, were they to rise and write again. We acknowledge them our fathers in wit; but they have ruined their estates themselves, before they came into their children's hands. There is scarce an humour, a character, or any kind of plot, which they have not blown upon. All comes sullied and wasted to us: and were they to entertain this age, they could not make so plenteous treatments out of such decayed fortunes. 3 Oddly, continuity is the source of Dryden's fear that the great chain of poets has been broken. Obsessed by the theme of succession, Dryden is betrayed into an artistic self-consciousness so intense that it would blast even a Shakespeare's originality. If he is to write at all, he must find another way, but it is not a better way, implicating him in what he calls "the tragedy of wit" ("Prologue to Aureng-Zebe," 1. 40). Despite his superb achievements in the sphere of wit, the way of imitation and embellishment is felt to be enervating; and as Dryden contemplates his relation to his greatest precursor he is compelled to acknowledge: "Shakespeare's magic could not copied be;/Within that circle none durst walk but he" {"Tempest Prologue," 11. 19-20). Collins recapitulates Dryden's dilemma in his curious mode, the halted-progress poem. The situation is epitomized in "An Epistle: Addressed to Sir Thomas Hanmer": Each rising art by just gradation moves, Toil builds on toil and age on age improves: The Muse alone unequal dealt her rage, And graced with noblest pomp her earliest stage. (17-20) Collins goes on to represent the fitful wanderings of the dramatic muse: from the nobility of the Grecian stage, to Rome, where there is a significant falling-off that continues in varying degrees through all ensuing ages until the emergence of Shakespeare, the culminating "stage" of this dramatic progress: But heaven, still various in its works, decreed The perfect boast of time should last succeed. The beauteous union must appear at length, Of Tuscan fancy and Athenian strength: One greater muse Eliza's reign adorn, And even a Shakespeare to her fame be born!

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Yet ah! so bright her morning's opening ray, In vain our Britain hoped an equal day! No second growth the western isle could bear, At once exhausted with too rich a year. (45-54) 4 The word "last" in line 46 is very grim; Collins envisions the subsequent history of the drama as one of steady decline, the English muse's circular "progress" from birth/to growth/to ripening/to decay now set in motion, presumably by an implacable "heaven." Collins' treatment of English dramatic history in the "Hanmer Epistle" does not extend beyond a glance at Jonson and Fletcher, but his views on the post-Shakespearean stage are more fully articulated in the fragment "Lines on Restoration Drama." 5 While in Jonson "Nature . . . was almost lost in art" and in Fletcher the strength of Shakespeare yielded to the tender passions of the "female mind," the writers of the Restoration (except for the minor instance of Otway) sacrificed both nature and strength to the decadent taste of France. "Naught pleased Augustus but what pleased Versailles!" (1. 18) he declaims; and though there is nothing of the fragment's satiric rant in the "Hanmer Epistle," a likeminded attitude toward French literary values is implicit throughout. Whatever their accomplishments, the great French dramatists are depicted as toilers in the garden of the muses: With gradual steps and slow, exacter France Saw Art's fair empire o'er her shores advance: By length of toil a bright perfection knew, Correctly bold and just in all she drew. (67-70) Collins has already affirmed that literary greatness is not to be achieved by hard work, toil building on toil in the manner which characterizes melioration in the other arts and sciences. Too wild to be confined by the just gradations of an exacter taste, the Shakespearean genius effortlessly transcends the "artful" categories of the French. Ironically, Shakespeare excels them in representing the historian's truth and manners (11. 77— 78), the very ends for which Corneille and Racine scrupulously toil. "Naught pleased Augustus but what pleased Versailles!": Collins has more than the French classical drama in mind. The English Augustans also took pride in their recovery of classic judgment, the toil with which they had polished the barbarousness of the language and brought English versification to a "bright perfection." How subtly does Collins turn Pope's own words against him, alluding in line 70 of the epistle to Pope's

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description of those soporific verses, "Correctly cold, and regularly low,/ That shunning faults, one quiet tenour keep" (Essay on Criticism, II, 240-241)! Rome and France, the two major sources of Augustan refinement and restraint according to this myth of literary history, are also seen to be the principal enemies of British freedom, political and poetic. Could this debilitating westward migration be halted? If in the "Hanmer Epistle" the advance, "with gradual steps and slow," of Judgment into France recalls the departure of Adam and Eve from Paradise, in the Restoration drama fragment the situation has worsened appreciably: "The taste of France, her manners and her style/. . . deluged all our isle" (11. 11-12). Collins offers a countercatastrophic myth in the antistrophe of the "Ode to Liberty." Celebrating the "blest divorce" of England and France in primeval times, he suggests his desire for a clear break with the Augustans and a new restoration of English poetry to its former splendor. One thinks of the high-spirited meeting of Collins and Joseph Warton at the Guildford Races during which they discussed their odes and looked forward to a joint publication, and of Warton's Advertisement in which he announces his revolutionary intent: "The Author . . . is convinced that the fashion of moralizing in Verse has been carried too far, and as he looks upon Invention and Imagination to be the chief Faculties of a Poet, so he will be happy if the following Odes may be looked upon as an Attempt to bring back Poetry into its right Channel." This urge to level the second temple of the Augustans is promising in that it represents an effort to exorcise the demon of continuity that plagued Dryden, but Collins' altogether too-loving return to the purer ancestral sources of the Renaissance exposes him to an embarrassment even greater than Dryden's. Unlike Dryden, Collins worships originality. Yet in the "Hanmer Epistle," for instance, he urges the moderns to "nurse their drooping fires" at Shakespeare's hallowed shrine, and the only evidence of resurgence he can produce is a gallery of imitative verse-portraits. Faced by an overload of greatness, Dryden chose another way. The issue for Collins is whether there yet remains a way other than imitating Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Would a new school of enfeebled imitators follow upon the heels of the Augustan experiment? Perhaps—and this is Collins' gloomiest fear—the prophecy of The Dunciad is being fulfilled: a new "laggard age" ("The Passions," 1. 112) emerging, the historical pattern of the decline in letters from Greece, to Rome, to the Dark Ages now being repeated in English literary history. 6 But if Collins shares his age's general pessimism about the fate of literary enterprise, he is a more driven pursuer of the negative than most. Not only do his progress pieces express the intellectual despair of a fallen being; they suggest as well a fallen conception of time and space accord-

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ing to which everything is static and unchanging no matter how much movement there is. The temporal and spatial horizons through which his giant forms glide are empty backdrops that accommodate a spectacle rather than authentic mediums capable of transmitting life. Trapped in the finite, Collins experiences time and space as antagonists, exiling him from paradise and blocking all efforts to redeem his desperately ungenerative present. Milton also knew the experience of being locked into fallen time and space. In the invocation to Book IX of Paradise Lost he expresses his ambition to supplant the heroic poetry of former ages, "unless an age too late, or cold / Climate, or Years damp my intended wing/Deprest" (11. 44-46). This is not the writer of the "Nativity Ode," of Animadversions, or Of Reformation, the writer who declared that "the present age . . . is to us an age of ages wherein God is manifestly come down among us, to do some remarkable good to our church or state." 7 The hope had been for the cooperative advance of Reformation and Enlightenment until the shortly expected King would descend to proclaim a universal monarchy through heaven and earth. The Circle of Eternity did not clasp hands however, and the betrayal of this fond millenarian dream marks a major turning point in Milton's career. Not only was there no New Jerusalem; the mature Milton confronts a languishing Albion distinctly less favorable to the poetical spirit than the era into which he was born. The last two books of Paradise Lost, in which temporality—indeed the entire cultural enterprise—is envisioned in terms of those chilling "Eyes of History," testify that a consciousness of human temporality as our long-day's-dying has commenced. Yet even though Milton's sense of temporal alienation is at least as sharp as Collins', his experience of fallen—or, better, falling—time is strongly mediated by his vision of Eternal Providence, the eternaltemporal. It is this principle of immanent transcendence which enables Milton to revalue fallen human history as a hopeful purgatorial venture, vouchsafing a teleology to time and a sustaining future to the Christian wayfarer-warfarer. Time for Milton is the midwife, not the mother of Truth, and the regenerate may return to the fountains of eternal Truth by purging the rays of his inward sight with the eyesalve of divine illumination. This is the true Miltonic Enlightenment: a private, interior event that allows the poet to inhabit a world of determinacy instead of determinations, according a transfiguring prophetic insight which renders the poet a contemporary of Time itself, more angel than Angle.8 Nevertheless, angelic transfiguration is an elusive goal. For while the soul is ever on the wing, the body will not be left behind; and while the poet woos the final

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metamorphosis of Apocalypse, this remains an unconsummated wooing which may permit a reinterpretation, but never an eclipse, of human realities. The space between possibility and fulfillment, or labor and grace, is the space of Milton's poetry, and thus the promise that paradise can be regained within through the agency of the Inner Light implicates Milton in the painful autobiographical meditation that is Paradise Lost. Milton's quest for renewal remains an arduous quest, the individual suffering the agony of time as such in vulnerable isolation even as he is supported by the consciousness of his superhuman capacity to grow. It can be said that Collins transmits just such a power for growth in his finest poetry. That he can do so reflects exemplary resistance; his is not, of course, Milton's astonishing ability to revise and recast himself in the face of adversity, but his struggle to build a heaven in hell's despite is an ennobling spiritual drama. Lacking a principle of redemptive grace and unable to intuit the terminal understanding he quests for, Collins still honors the value of the quest itself. To understand his poetical character we must explore the enlightened artist's often heroic efforts to transmute his personal anxieties into creative action. Yet how can the enlightened mind rid itself of itself? How exchange the burdens of reflection for the pleasures of imagination? In an effort to countervail the contagion of the age, many an eighteenth-century writer proposes a radical elision of the reflective stage of consciousness. Rejecting the perplexities of discursive intelligence, the writer may, like Sterne, give himself over to the joys of errancy, a delicious disorder of the instinctive and fortuitous; or, like Thomson and the Wartons, enwomb himself in solitary recesses to escape those social distractions which so clog the mind that it cannot reproduce the sensitivity of the finer ear; or he may cultivate a gentler, rural simplicity of feeling in the manner of Parnell, Ramsay, and Shenstone. The promise inspiring these authors is the realization of some form of ignorant bliss, a naive and spontaneous sensibility in freer contact with the diverse life of external nature and subjective experience. Liberty—whether Grecian or Gothic, Picturesque or Sublime—is invoked as an antidote to all that is associated with the Augustan tradition: the rigors of truth telling, the witty or "pointed" style, the inhibitions of the civilized community. Hence, in Shenstone's first elegy, he bids "Augusta's venal sons farewell," retiring to the freedom of his native skies to consort with his dearest goddess—"O lov'd Simplicity!" The quest for the allied virtues of simplicity, spontaneity, and liberty led a host of the period's Miltonidae to the "L'Allegro"-"Il Penseroso"

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sequence.9 What appealed most to these writers is what is most striking as one arrives in the brave new world following the exordium of "L'Allegro": the unself-consciousness and self-indulgence of Milton's improvisational manner, the apparently limitless store of his imaginative and verbal energies. "Miltonic artlessness" may seem a contradiction in terms, but the overwhelming impression, especially of "L'Allegro," is of radical immediacy and continuous freshening outward movement. As in a dream, Milton doesn't look back. Not only does the adroit peripatetic rhythm convey a sense that each line or couplet represents a new start; Milton's grammatical and syntactical liberties, tense shifts, and freeranging movement through time and space suggest that the speaker is infinitely distractible, willing and able to give himself wholly to the charm of each moment as it passes. Passing from pleasure to pleasure, he goes forth to greet the phenomena which invite him, experiencing no disjunction between sensation and perception, perception and pleasure. This continuity of world and persona is complemented by the cooperation of natural, human, and divine ontological orders, and is indicated even in the burlesque of the exordium. Loathed Melancholy receives an appropriate parentage (at once mythic and natural) and habitation (at once natural and psychic). The darkness into which it is banished is fledged like a bird and haunted by the song of the night-raven. Is Night a raven or is the raven the bird of Night? It hardly matters; Milton indifferently gives birdliness to darkness and darkness to a bird. Mixing received myths, personal fantasies, and perceptions "with a fine promiscuity," 10 Milton returns us to a world before the Fall wherein there is no need for the imaginative man to stand and wait: "In Saturn's reign, / Such mixture was not held a stain" ("Il Penseroso," 1. 26). Leslie Brisman and Stanley Fish are in agreement that "from the standpoint of 'L'Allegro,' 'and' indicates simply the unfallen full world, and 'or' the indifferent turning from one object of interest to another. From the standpoint of 'Il Penseroso,' 'or' acknowledges the experiential and moral burdens of choice, while the word 'and' can signal a suspect desire to hold on to the fullness in the fallen world." 11 There are, of course, important distinctions to be drawn between the poems: "Il Penseroso" advances beyond "L'Allegro," and the fundamental direction of the former is inward and downward, of the latter outward and upward; yet the holistic aim of both is interior expansion. The world of "L'Allegro" is not one of unpurged multiplicity, and Milton's apparent artlessness is largely only apparent. For the poem does have a palpable design—if not always on the reader, at least on Milton himself. The parataxis, which might lead to aimlessness, and the catalogues, which

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might lapse into a monotony of namings, are countered by a structural principle of repetition which allows for fluency while simultaneously giving the poem its unity and direction. Hence, Milton offers two genealogies of Mirth, the second richer and more expansive; converts the heaviness of "In Heav'n yclep'd Euphrosyne" to "And by men, hearteasing Mirth"; fulfills the surmise of lines 7 7 - 8 0 in lines 117-124; and, as he moves toward self-exaltation at the conclusion, passes from Hymen to his own marriage with immortal verse. Rather than simply multiplying pleasures, Milton retains them until they are refined; he begins by rejecting a false extreme and proceeds in his mock-narrative through a series of incremental repetitions until exactly the right kind of pleasure is attained. 12 "L'Allegro," like "Il Penseroso," is a progress or quest poem, a ritual of self-purgation. The quest is for poetic integrity, and its metamorphical poles are Morpheus and Orpheus. 13 Between these two terminal states of soul there are numerous fables of birth and awakening, guiding the persona along from transcendence to transcendence without a suggestion that such transformation is anything but pleasurable and unviolent. Nevertheless, as in all quest-romance, the dream of benign metamorphosis is shadowed by the possibility of fixation. This may help to explain the rapidity of the verse and Milton's refusal to stop and visualize, pictorialize, or monumentalize. One thinks of the poem's probable origins in Burton's prescriptions against black Melancholy, the "wrinkled Care" and "eating Cares" of lines 31 and 135, and of the ominous implications of the Orpheus myth. If, however, one can measure health in terms of the amount of disease with which an organism can cope, "L'Allegro" is a very healthy poem. Milton's sense of self-presence is never in doubt, the poet affirming his originative I am: I am present wherever and whenever I choose to be. And he can do whatever he wishes. Advancing toward a future that is approaching him and married to immortal verse, he avoids Orpheus' fate. His voice is sufficiently powerful to melt the "linked" sweetness of "all the chains that tie / The hidden soul of harmony" and so can waken Orpheus to a song that would have made Hell grant what Love did seek. A new and more potent Orpheus is born. What happens when Collins attempts to retrace Milton's path to freedom?—"The Manners," a poem in which Milton's magic is dissipated at Collins' every touch. Collins begins by bidding hence the oddly compounded company of Science, Reason, Pride, Doubt, and Fancy, pledging himself to the vita activa. Yet instead of acting he invokes the youth Observance whose function is to view "life's wide prospects" and "read in man the native heart." Observation, however, sees nothing, and

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Collins is soon lured away from his spectatorial pose by his enchantress Fancy: Till meddling Art's officious lore Reverse the lessons taught before, Alluring from a safer rule To dream in her enchanted school; Thou Heaven, whate'er of great we boast, Hast blest this social science most. (31-36) I doubt that Collins knows what he wishes to express. Are the "lessons taught before" Nature's or those of the Academy rejected in the exordium? The final couplet above suggests that he hopes to learn his science in Art's enchanted school; but in lines 19-30 he expressed a desire to cultivate the "science sure" of direct natural observation. Does he want "Tho' Heaven" rather than "Thou Heaven" in line 35, and if so what point is he making? Collins' problems center on an unresolved tension between Nature and Fancy, a conflict that seems to derive from his uncertainty about their meaning. Nature is by turns the generalized (human) Nature of neoclassic theory and the more immediate and inclusive "Nature boon" of the poem's conclusion, and Fancy is either a mimic or an enchanting elf. There is one attempt to resolve this confusion: Retiring hence to thoughtful cell, As Fancy breathes her potent spell, Not vain she finds the charmful task; In pageant quaint, in motley mask, Behold before her musing eyes The countless Manners round her rise. (37-42) To behold the living Manners, then, Collins must retire from Nature. If Nature is to be alive for us, it must be an artful Nature. The strategy is ingenious, but too self-consciously so, involving an arbitrary ritual of retreat and a patently mechanical elevation from perception to vision. Furthermore, it is Fancy who does the work, and the result of her shift from darkness to illumination is a pedestrian, if at times sprightly, pastiche of "L'Allegro." That middle realm of spirits and incumbent enchantments which mediates the flow of life between the persona and his world in Milton lingers embarrassingly in the residual form of those unwieldy personifications which inhibit Collins' ability to see either himself or nature with awakened eyes. He is unable to navigate between

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Nature and Fancy except by means of sharp categorical reversals, each requiring a separate address and a separate style. Every transition is a crisis. How unlike the supple continuity of styles and moods, the artful fusion of paratactic rhythms and incremental repetitions of "L'Allegro"! Uneasily suspended between society, nature, passion, and vision, a pathos-ridden ephebe of indeterminate character is born. The "Ode to Simplicity," although a more successful return to the spirit of Milton's octosyllabics, is riddled by similar problems. Collins associates the themes of simplicity and liberty throughout. In the stanzas charting Simplicity's "progress" he links literary greatness and political freedom, and the goddess is characterized as a lover of mountain solitudes, like Milton's "Sweet Liberty" in "L'Allegro." Instructed by Nature "to breathe her genuine thought" (1. 2), Simplicity is said to have nursed in Fancy the powers of song; and as Collins conjures with the sacred names of the past in stanzas 3 and 4, he summons the spirit of the writers of ancient Greece through an evocation of the spontaneous natural music which prompted their lyrical response. Thus, the source of genuine poetic simplicity is steadfast attention to the elemental vitality of earth. Yet, although expressing a desire for a direct relationship with nature answering to his immediate feelings, Collins also comprehends Simplicity as a principle of mediation. In terms of the poem's allegory, she is the mediator of Nature and Fancy. Moreover, she is a reconciling being in whose person are merged the extremes of naiveté, elegance, and strength, her songs described as "warmly pure and sweetly strong" (1. 3). Stanza 5, an anticipation of Romantic organicism, presents her as an informing spirit of aesthetic harmony. Here the great Attic writers serve Collins as a model. Inspired syncretists, they liberally indulge their instinctual energies while at the same time accommodating them to a chaste and unified design. In the fragment "To Simplicity" he carefully distinguishes the imperturbable simplicity of the Greeks from the overanxious spontaneity of modern enthusiasts: Nor modest Picture less Declined the wild excess, Which frequent now distracts her wild design: The modest graces laid Each soft, unboastful shade, While feeling Nature drew the impassioned line! (25-30) If Collins' theoretical categories are rarely elaborated in the fragment or the ode, his poetic project is clear enough: can he discover a form that

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will enable him to curb imagination's "wild excess" without disowning either freedom or strength? Another way of putting it is that Collins wishes to emulate Milton's harmonization of simple, sensuous, and passionate modalities in the Companion Poems. Despite the fact that he restricts Simplicity's historical progress to the classical period, "Il Penseroso" is the dominant, and frequently deadening, influence here. The heir of Milton's Melancholy, Simplicity partakes of both energy and calm, but she is not a spirit of energetic calm. Collins shuttles nervously between passion and reticence, seriously imperiling Simplicity's supposed mediative virtue. She is alternately a spontaneous nature-sprite, roaming at large amid "mountains wild" (1. 4), and a sober hermit, "a decent maid / In Attic robe arrayed" (11. 10—11), yet never do these contrary tendencies enter into the synthesizing dynamics of a dialectic, as in lines 3 1 - 4 4 of "Il Penseroso." Collins' predicament recalls "The Manners." But here he resorts to abstract or formulaic hypotheses in order to reconcile Simplicity's various attributes, an effort which fails due to his readiness to fuse Simplicity, Nature, Fancy, Liberty, Order, Truth, and Virtue into a single amorphous entity. 14 Uncertain, Collins tries to say everything at once, and so lapses into incoherence. His preoccupation with abstractions, so alien to the spirit of "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," is the clearest indication that Milton's harmonizing power has been lost. Collins' ideal of Simplicity as fidelity to nature remains a crux, not so much because of his intellectual turmoil, as because of his estrangement from the most elementary natural realities. There is scarcely any natural detail in the ode. Not that we ought to expect him to number the streaks of the tulip; but in order to constitute what Collins means by Nature's "genuine thought" the reader requires some trace of sensory involvement, some evidence of the kindling of thought or feeling in nature's presence. In stanzas 3 and 4, where he does attempt to evoke a natural setting, this impoverishment of nature-feeling is sensed most keenly, since he can respond only through a medley of Miltonic echoes. Thus, however much Collins argues that Fancy should blend its powers with those of Nature, his insensitivity to the natural world, his lack of simplicity, suggests the difficulties inherent in attempting to localize Fancy's wild or divine excess within a naturalistic matrix. When Fancy, the goddess addressed in the fragment "To Simplicity," is freely indulged, as in stanza 8, its powers are quick to impinge upon Nature's. Fancy-Simplicity is impatient with mimesis, its own "natural" inclination shown to be an eagerness for Sublime experience. "Thou, only thou can'st raise the meeting soul!" he writes at the end of stanza 8.

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In stanza 9, however, he retreats into Simplicity's "temperate vale," a shying away from Sublime possibility that betokens more than a conventional reluctance to graduate from pastoral piping to some mightier task. To raise the "meeting soul" of "L'Allegro" (1. 138) would be to follow Milton's example in the Companion Poems: the poet mounting by just gradations from ordinary experience to "something like Prophetic strain," the soul's heightened sense of its own sublimity. But to do so might also mean an ultimate—and perhaps fatal—estrangement from the domain of familiar nature. Collins, whose relation to that realm is already precarious, therefore checks his exuberance at the conclusion of the ode, but as a consequence he transforms Simplicity into the direct obverse of the spontaneously creative spirit he initially courted: a restrictive formal principle masking as a principle of reticence or self-effacement. The quest has come full circle, and Collins is still to seek a proper subject for his imagination. A glance at the "Ode to Pity" will bear out much of what I have said about the "Simplicity Ode." The goddess is again conceived as a mediator of temperance and spontaneity, associated with the simple purity of Grecian forms and the artlessness of unrestrained natural music. Again Collins emphasizes the milder virtues in his evocation of Pity: a tender virgin, she is assigned the task of calming our stormier passions, charming away Distress and Fear with the graces of pastoral song. But if such is the power of Otway, Pity's English bard, Collins' own enthusiasm cannot be subdued to the mildness of the "female heart" (1. 22). Like Simplicity, Pity is also capable of moving, inspiring, and possessing, and in the final stanzas of the ode Collins addresses himself to Pity's Sublime attributes. Invoking "Fancy's aid" (1. 25), he envisions the "Temple of Pity": Its southern site, its truth complete Shall raise a wild enthusiast heat In all who view the shrine. All infelicities aside (why, one wonders, should the temple's "southern site" elicit this response?), the passage demonstrates Collins' eagerness for a power different from, and perhaps opposed to, Otway's sweetly elegiac spirit. He would leave nature behind to dwell within Pity's sacred precinct, there indulging his dreams of passionate excess: There let me oft, retired by day, In dreams of passion melt away, Allowed with thee to dwell: There waste the mournful lamp of night,

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Till, virgin, thou again delight To hear a British shell! (37-42) The poem, then, reverses the thematic pattern of the "Simplicity Ode," concluding with an apparently triumphant exaltation of the pleasures of solitude. Yet there is something terribly wrong here. For it is clear that Collins is led to Pity's shrine by his own ungratified desire rather than by "Fancy's aid," and equally clear that Milton rather than Pity herself is the temple's presiding genius. The ode's young enthusiast is the poet of "Il Penseroso" all over again, but with the crucial difference that Milton's magnificent Solitary is now a desperately self-conscious, indecisive dreamer, or at best a deluded self-hypnotist. What could be more at variance with Collins' urge to abandon himself to narcotic rapture than his feeble recapitulation of the experience of Milton's Melancholy Man? Like him, Collins would burn his "Lamp at midnight hour" (1. 85) in the place of solitary meditation; like him, Collins would cry, "Dissolve me into ecstasies" (1. 165). Unlike his master, however, Collins is doomed to suffer the trials of vacillation, never confident as the celebrant of Nature or Fancy, never certain whether he wishes to conceive his goddess as a naturalistic or visionary muse. All that happens in the "Ode to Pity" is that the poet, unsatisfied by natural fact, turns in upon himself, only to discover that his own imaginative longings are inherited longings, the imaginative possibilities already propounded and enjoyed by his great precursor. It is evident that Collins' will to unself-conscious power is not in itself sufficient to permit a recovery of either the spontaneity of the Natural Man (Otway) or the imaginative wholeness of a Miltonic Solitary— indeed Collins' aggressive intentionality is a major cause of his perplexity. Collins' quest for immediacy, especially rapturous immediacy, is perhaps the most conspicuous feature of his poetic experience. Receiving his primary impetus from Milton's octosyllabics and the invocations to Paradise Lost—though drawing as well from Pindar, Longinus, and other sources feeding the eighteenth-century Sublime tradition—Collins is haunted by an ideal of the Original Genius as a figure of preternatural intensity. It is the vision of such a poet, breathing "energy divine," that prompts this awe-full prayer in Joseph Warton's "Ode to Fancy": O queen of numbers, once again Animate some chosen swain, Who, filled with unexhausted fire,

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May boldly smite the sounding lyre, Who with some new, unequalled song, May rise above the rhyming throng, O'er all our list'ning passions reign, O'erwhelm our souls with joy and pain. (129-136) Utterly engrossed in his "dreams of passion," the Sublime Poet is led beyond the object world, temporality, and reflection to the ecstasy of "some prophetic rage" ("Ode to Liberty," 1. 127), discharging his thoughts like lightnings. His proper mode of consciousness is "rapture blind"; for to such a poet, to feel is to exist.15 For Collins, however, the way of rapture blind readily becomes a purgatory blind. An enthusiast he may be, yet he is habitually divided between knowledge and power, held back from the final transport he covets by his enlightened mind. Instead of joyously acknowledging inspiration received, in the manner of Milton, he rises—or sinks—to an ecstasy that is never quite ecstatic enough. Hence, at the end of the rapturous "Ode to Fear" Collins implores his goddess, 0 thou whose spirit most possessed The sacred seat of Shakespeare's breast! By all that from thy prophet broke, In thy divine emotions spoke, Hither again thy fury deal, Teach me but once like him to feel. Prayers of this sort have led many to the erroneous conclusion that Collins is lacking in feeling. Collins feels, all right; but what he feels most urgently is his estrangement from the passionate integrity of unselfconscious or "unmixed" feeling. Impatient and aching, he is a fever of himself, his intensity springing directly from baffled desire. The closest analogue of his situation in the century is that of Cowpcr in "The Contrite Heart": 1 hear, but seem to hear in vain, Insensible as steel; If ought is felt, 'tis only pain, To find I cannot feel. My best desires are faint and few, I fain would strive for more; But when I cry, "my strength renew," Seem weaker than before.

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Oh make this heart rejoice, or ache: Decide this doubt for me; And if it be not broken, break, And heal it, if it be. (5-8, 13-16, 21-24) The structure of Cowper's inner debate is identical to Collins': change the name of his precariously responsive savior from Christ to Fear or Fancy, and one has the basic form of a Collinsian enthusiastic lyric. Enthusiastic in pathos, Collins is a wisher unto death. Continually visited by sudden glimpses of his most home-felt imaginative desires, he is tormented by the evanescence of these possibilities which, in continually being annulled, only intensify his urgency. Suspended in this divisive dialectic, he sighs to be renewed, and in order to break his impasse invokes the aid of increasingly violent, "soul-enforcing" ("Ode to Liberty," 1. 92) stimuli. If his doubts are to be dispelled, it must be by means of a usurpation, an influx of power—a rape of mind. The way of ecstatic pursuit is a dubious remedy for Collins because, unlike Sterne or even Thomson, he cannot sustain the quest as a disinterested aesthetic activity—that "love of pursuit, merely as pursuit" celebrated by Hogarth. 16 Instead, he longs to fulfill himself, to decide his doubts and complete his quest, all in the moment of passionate intensity: O more than all in powerful genius blest, Come, take thine empire o'er the willing breast! ("Hanmer Epistle," 101-102) If but from thee I hope to feel, On all my heart imprint thy seal! ("The Manners," 73-74) O bid our vain endeavours cease, Revive the just designs of Greece, Return . . . ("The Passions," 115-117) The magic works, thou feel'st the strains, One holier name alone remains; The perfect spell shall then avail. ("Ode to Liberty," 60-62) No more, sweet maid, the enfeebling dreams prolong. Return . . . In all thy ancient strength . . . ("Simplicity Fragment," 9-11) In vain: the quest for dilation of the moment is baffled, and vexed by his covetousness, Collins always invites a catastrophic turn from exhilara-

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tion to dejection. As Blake so profoundly understood, to woo a consummation of desire in such precipitous fashion is to undertake a negative quest: every increase of imaginative power is accompanied by an increase of despair, and the stronger one's imagination is the more ruinous one's Spectre is likely to be. Yet although a stranger to Blake's wisdom, and hence incapable of penetrating the origins of his predicament, Collins remains very much aware of its gravity. The destructive potential of the imagination, what Collins calls its "withering power" ("Ode to Fear," 1. 43), is expressly acknowledged in the second of the Persian Eclogues, the "Ode to Fear," and the "Popular Superstitions Ode." For the present, directing our analysis less to the content of his vision than to the "structures" of his imagination, we may note Collins' obsession with the idea of wounding. To exist in the world of his poems is to be "on the spot": isolated, vulnerable, imperiled. Nearly all of his goddesses are called upon to relieve some sort of distress, either that of the poet or of his native land; or else, as in the "Ode to Evening," the goddess herself must be soothed. Coincident with irruptive violence, these wounds have numerous sources, but the most common is War. Though one does wrong to reduce such violence to imagination's violence from within, there is reason to question the traditional division of Collins' poetry into two groups, one "imaginative" and the other "political." For example, when he refers in the "Ode to Mercy" to the "Fiend of Nature," "he whom even our joys provoke" (1. 14), we are induced to think not only of War, but of Satan, specifically Milton's Satan, or of Original Sin. Knowing Collins better, we may consider the possibility of Original Imaginative Sin, what Johnson knew to be "that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life, and must be always appeased by some employment" (Rasselas, chap. 32). The alliance of external and internal violence is more explicit in the "Ode, to a Lady on the Death of Colonel Ross." Here it is Fancy that "Awakes to grief the softened mind,/And points the bleeding friend" (11. 11-12). Most painful is the vision of the penultimate stanza, where to Fancy's "distant eye" the corpse of the fallen colonel appears "exposed and bare . . . / Wild War insulting near" (11. 53-54). Such a vision of the exposed, wounded self, a prey to uncontrollably demonic forces, is always in the corner of Collins' mind. Of particular significance in the ode is his recognition of Fancy's inclination to self-wounding. Colonel Ross may be slain, but Fancy is "to herself unkind" (1. 10), prompt to exacerbate a bad situation by imagining to herself both the stricken corpse and the approach of Tyrant War. Almost every awakening, every birth, every creation in Collins' poetry

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is also a wounding. In this, Milton is again his great precursor. When we read at the opening of Paradise Lost that Satan is "Hurl'd headlong flaming from th' Ethereal Sky" (1. 45), I think we respond so deeply because Milton has realized the ultimate mythic version of the birthwound. The great difference between Collins and Milton on this score is that while in Collins wounding is fundamentally self-wounding, in Milton the wounded or diseased consciousness is carefully distanced. By externalizing the Promethean aspect of his imagination under demonic guises and at the same time girding himself with the armor of the resolute Christian, Milton is remarkably successful, as few poets since have been, in keeping his internal violence from becoming self-directed. It is the torment of Milton's devils that anticipates the feverishly energetic deathin-life of Collins. Here is Nisroch during the War in Heaven: Sense of pleasure, we may well Spare out of life perhaps, and not repine; But live content, which is the calmest life: But pain is perfect misery, the worst Of evils, and excessive, overturns All patience, (VI.459-464) and here Satan, Milton's supreme Man of Passion: I to Hell am thrust Where neither joy nor love, but fierce desire Among our other torments not the least, Still unfulfill'd with pain of longing pines. (IV.508-511) The two passages epitomize the movement within consciousness I have been tracing in this chapter, from the pains of thought to the pains of desire: pain >impatience >fierce desire >unfulfilled with pain of longing pines. I noted earlier that Satan's originative wound springs mysteriously from thought itself, Collins' from the self-conscious enlightened mind. Each suffers the violent interruption of a blissfully harmonious order (for Satan, the immutable rhythms of Heaven; for Collins, the magic circle of the pre-Enlightenment), and tormented by loss, each is fitfully driven by a hope that converges with despair. To endeavor to heal the wound in consciousness through the pursuit of the illusory freedom of passion is to heap more damnation upon oneself—to aggravate the "discontinuous wound" which came into being when Satan "first knew pain" (VI.327 ff.). In his important essay on the Age of Sensibility, Frye stresses the ideal

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of a "continuous present" among the writers of the period, their concern with literature as "process" (Longinian) rather than as "product" (Aristotelian), their cultivation of Sublime states of mind. "Where the emphasis is on the original process," he writes, "the qualities of subconscious association take the lead, and the poetry becomes hypnotically repetitive, oracular, incantatory, dreamlike and in the original sense of the word, charming." 17 There is much to be said for this argument. Collins' poetry contains all the characteristics of a poetry of process delineated by Frye. As he observes, the promise such oracular forms hold forth is that of transcending the limitations of existence in time, of returning to the primitive wholeness of unreflective consciousness. Collins, it is clear, would convince himself that through the performance of just the proper miming, identifying, gesturing rite he might recover the "charming," or magically binding, powers of an ecstatic bard. Nevertheless, Frye fails to consider the difficulty, the danger, indeed the impossibility of pursuing such an ideal. To abandon oneself to the intensity of a continuous present ("to be an intensity without realizing it," as Gaston Bachelard writes) 18 would be to live out existence in the manner of a Nietzschean Superman—an even more unlikely role for Collins than for Nietzsche himself. Why, after all, the preoccupation with process in the literature of Sensibility? Smart hints at an answer in his description of his cat Jeoffry's activities in Jubilate Agno: "For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life" (xx, 16). What better account of his own literary activity in the poem, or of Sterne's in Tristram Shandy} "To stand still, or get on slowly," Sterne writes, "is death and the devil" (VII, xiii). If he continually pursues the spontaneous line of beauty it is because he is driven to do so: consciousness (the only life) must continually regenerate itself in order to ward off the unremitting pressure of self-consciousness (the only death). The pontifical labor of every fresh movement of mind is to overcome a discontinuity. Lacking Sterne's lucid ironic resilience and writing in a less supple medium, Collins is not so successful in averting the fixations of reflective thought. In his endeavor to convey a sense of emotion maintained within the horizon of a continuous present, he resorts to those repetitive and regressive stylistic devices which Angus Fletcher likens to "armor on a medieval knight; they dignify him but they also stiffen him, locking him into a strictly measured gait." 19 Like knightly armor, moreover, Collins' ceremonial style—designed to bear the poet hypnotically along from moment to moment—is self-protective. What he dreads is the horror of the gaps between, those moments of self-consciousness when he will no longer be able to "charm his frantic woe" ("Ode to Pity," 1. 3). Yet his art exists to deny him the self-forgetfulness he wishes. Entrusting himself

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to the mediatory forms of the literary past, too often grown excessive and unwieldy in his own writing, he is betrayed into the very selfconsciousness he seeks to evade. The old magic will not work; both self-consciousness and its attendant discontinuities remain. The presence of discontinuity, or absence, is attested to by Collins' most conspicuous mediatory structure: the ritual of prayer. Isolated from familar nature, the company of other men, and even his own empirical self, Collins is ever menaced by solipsism. Invocation, however, betokens an urge to be released from the burdens of solitude. Through the agency of prayer the meeting soul is granted a spirit, a potential bride, a Thou toward which it may aspire. Much as in the Petrarchan tradition, desire is a central—perhaps the central—motif of Collins' poetry, and though often chastened to a mood of votive calm, it is best understood as an erotic form of desire. Lovesick and unmated, Collins appeals to every one of his goddesses with essentially the same invitation: come live with me and be my love. 20 The invitational structure of Collins' odes derives chiefly from Milton's octosyllabics, but the difference in emphasis is striking. In Milton, the persona passes from entreaty to assertion with extraordinary ease, obviously enjoying his pleasures even as he sues for them. No matter how awesome the goddess, Milton confronts her on equal terms, as power to power, never for a moment forgetting that he is the master of his own revels, that he has given the goddess her genealogy. As in Blake, the poet-muse relationship is conditional: if you do this for me, then I will choose to dwell with you. In short, the writer of the Companion Poems is the same audacious egoist of the "Nativity Ode" who would present his gift to the Savior before the Magi are allowed to offer theirs. Collins, on the other hand, feels obliged to appease the goddess with an offering of his "humble rite" ("Ode to Pity," 1. 9), assuming a characteristic posture of "shuddering meek submitted thought" ("Ode to Fear," 1. 53). At times this mood gives way to a powerful invocatory exuberance reminiscent of Milton; yet even where Collins is most assertive there remains a profound distinction between the two poets. For seldom, and then only nervously, does Collins approach the energy of anticipation Milton generates, that sense of being on the threshold of power which, as always in Milton, is both a foretaste and mastery of power. Instead of enjoying the pleasures he imagines, Collins waits—sometimes wistfully, sometimes restlessly, but never in might—for his prayers to be answered. Ultimately everything is seen to depend on a power external to the poet, an agency of grace that may fail him at any moment. Accordingly, the burden of choice devolves upon the goddess: if you condescend to do this for me, then I will be pleased to dwell with you. One senses that Collins

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would dwell with any goddess that would have him. The consequences of this surrender of autonomy are often disastrous. At once pathetically distanced from the object of his desire and yet deeply in thrall, he is apt to suffer a radical displacement of his erotic quest: the goddess hardening into a Miltonic "unmeet consort" who balks the poet's desire for relationship by accentuating his, already heightened, sense of inner poverty. Collins' relationship to his muses is even more troubled than I have indicated. We know that his poems are at basis prayers for inspiration— but to whom is Collins calling for inspiration? When, for example, at the opening of the "Ode to Pity" he identifies the goddess as "the friend of man assigned / With balmy hands his wounds to bind," we realize he wishes to view her as a messenger or angelic guardian; what we are not told is who "assigns" this role to Pity. Does Collins worship an Unknown God, some mysterious Greater-Thou who delegates authority to his various muses? The supposition is dubious, unless one takes this "Unknown God" to be the hierarchic forms of literary tradition. Whatever the emotive value of these forms, it is evident that in the world of Collins' odes they are no longer capable of evoking the sense of a true Kosmos rich in internal communications and symbolisms. Thus, one finds in Collins an isolating, compartmentalizing tendency (his numerous goddesses consigned to distinct, often mutually exclusive experiential spheres), and along with this a tendency toward dispersion (the deities of his exploding pantheon rarely, if ever, conceived as agents or attributes of some inclusive principle or authority). It can be argued, of course, that the ultimate referent in Collins is psychic, since most of the personified deities he invokes embody, in purified form, specific faculties of the poet himself. Yet, as we have seen, Collins' internal faculties are generally neither unified nor dialectically interactive, and as a result the imaginative center cannot hold despite his rather desperate advocacy of ideas of order. This tendency toward evacuation and dispersal of the center may be regarded as basic to Collins' greatest achievements, his explorations of the daemonic ground of prosopopoeia. In his study of the "Daemonic Agent" (a correlative term for a Collinsian internalized personification)21 Fletcher writes: "Coming from the term that means 'to divide,' daemon implies an endless series of divisions of all important aspects of the world into separate elements for study and control." 22 Collins' poetry, in its totality, represents just such a process as Fletcher describes. His odes, in essence, are an exaggeration of the either/or motif of Milton's "AllegroPenseroso" sequence. The joy Milton had discovered in the mind's freedom to assume antithetical masks for the self becomes in Collins a promiscuous multiplication of moods, an explosive scattering of affections. 23 Becoming whatever hazard orders him to be—fearful, angry,

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desperate, hopeful, vengeful, compassionate, jealous, melancholy, cheerful, joyous—Collins finds that the more he enlarges the area in which he feels he exists, the more he enlarges the perimeter of his disquietudes. He has fallen into multiplicity. A consideration of "The Passions. An Ode for Music" can serve as a summary and confirming retrospect of the ideas advanced in the present chapter. Collins' starting point is an anxiety occasioned by the breaking of the circle, or more appropriately here the untuning of the sky, and his fundamental project is to reintegrate his own dislocated imaginative faculties. He is inspired by the promise of a return to the spontaneous expressive vigor of early Greece, setting before himself the task of reversing a divisive trend in the historical evolution of poetry and music (anatomized in John Brown's title A Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions of Poetry and Music). Such a revivified Orphic lyricism, wedding voice and verse, would be at one and the same time "Warm, energetic, chaste, sublime!" (1. 106), a poetry of the "native heart, / Devote to virtue, fancy, art" (11. 103-104). Collins' synchronistic rage is reminiscent of the "Ode to Simplicity," and once again he desires to achieve both a fuller participation in the life of passionate immediacy and formal integrity. His aim, in other words, is to reconcile Prolific and Devourer, Dionysos and Apollo, not merely abstractly but under the aspect of a "braided dance." Collins idealizes the goddess Music, aspiring to the harmonious vision of her perfected consciousness and her consequent 'all-commanding power" (1. 100) over the Passions. Yet he does not even attempt a vision of the whole. Music remains a shadowy off-stage personage, at once too full and too empty a being to elicit a coherent response from the reader. What does compel our response, however, is the pageant occupying the middle section of the ode. The various Passions had come to Music's "magic cell" to attend her performance, but instead each seizes one of her instruments and performs his own part: "Each, for madness ruled the hour, / Would prove his own expressive power" (11. 15-16). The ecstatic aim of the individual Passions is immediate self-presence, the coincidence of cause and effect through the medium of sound, here conceived as a spontaneous channel of expression subject to neither temporal nor spatial limitation. The self-defeating nature of this quest for radical immediacy is illumined by Gibbon's remarks on the primitive consciousness: "In this state of primitive simplicity, the passive soul, ignorant of its strength, can do no more than receive external impressions which inform him of objects merely in an isolated state." 24 E. R. Dodds's analysis clarifies Gibbon's: "The Greek had always felt the experience of passion as some-

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thing mysterious and frightening, the experience of a force that was in him, possessing him, rather than possessed by him. The very word p thos testifies to that: like its Latin equivalent passio, it means something that 'happens to' a man, something of which he is a passive victim." 25 "Exulting, trembling, raging, fainting, / Possessed" (11. 5-6), Collins' Passions are conceived in precisely these terms, and aside from the inevitable personal cost of such an ideal of enraptured passivity, there is something of an aesthetic cost as well. For the passive individual, one who is overwhelmed or longing to be overwhelmed by passion, quantity of feeling matters more than its quality. Collins, accordingly, is often guilty of simply beating the doubling drum in furious heat (11. 46-47) in order to display those portentous attitudes and gestures which he apparently thinks are "infinitely more expressive of sentiments and feelings than words can possibly be." 2 6 Not only mastered by his environment, Gibbon states that the primitive mind perceives it discontinuously. The relevance to the mental landscape of "The Passions" is obvious. Unable to sustain the poem's genetic impulse to marry immediacy and order, Collins achieves a triumph of the parts at the expense of the whole. Although there is a certain amount of interplay between the dramatis personae, the prevailing structural unit is the isolated portrait conceived in bold relief. Collins offers a succession of masterful epiphanies, each of his personifications aspiring to the condition of what Η. Κ. Usener terms a "momentary god." 27 But metonymic contiguity overbalances the urge for metaphoric identification. Unchecked by a medial ground of encounter, either mythic or dialecticalprogressive, his catalogue of the Passions, by its very nature indefinitely extensive, dissipates itself in a frenetic expenditure of energy. "The Passions" reenacts Collins' vocational quest. Displaying "his own expressive power," each of the Passions corresponds to the performing self of Collins' various odes. The performance is often impressive, as in the splendid account of Joy's ecstatic trial (11. 81-94), but Collins never, or at least believes he never, reproduces "the hidden soul of harmony." Rather than a sublime shaper of feeling, like Music, he presents himself as a victim of the Passions, following his joyous bacchanal with the anguished question, O Music, sphere-descended maid, Friend of pleasure, Wisdom's aid, Why, goddess, why to us denied? (95-97) Feeling having yielded to reflection, he concludes with a prayer for the revival of ancient lyricism, celebrating his goddess in high despair:

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'Tis said, and I believe the tale, Thy humblest reed could more prevail, Had more of strength, diviner rage, Than all which charms this laggard age, Even all at once together found, Caecilia's mingled world of sound— O bid our vain endeavours cease, Revive the just designs of Greece, Return in all thy simple state! Confirm the tales her sons relate! The lines recall the concluding movement of "At a Solemn Music," where Milton implores the "Sphere-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and Verse" to mingle their powers in celestial consort, That we on Earth with undiscording voice May rightly answer that melodious noise; As once we did, till disproportion'd sin Jarr'd against nature's chime, and with harsh din Broke the fair music that all creatures made To their great Lord, whose love their motion sway'd In perfect Diapason, whilst they stood In first obedience and their state of good. O may we soon again renew that Song, And keep in tune with Heav'n, till God ere long In his Celestial consort us unite, To live with him, and sing in endless morn of light. Though imbued with a similar quality of pathos, the two passages reveal a major point at which Collins and Milton diverge, both as poets and as men. In Collins the prayer is limited to an aesthetic context, but in Milton the prayer for aesthetic renewal is inextricably allied to a prayer for spiritual renewal, the poet now passing by the goddesses he initially invoked in an effort to greet his Greater-Thou. Milton's advantage is clear. This is not to say that his orthodoxy represents a positive poetic virtue. What it does afford him, however, is a means of controlling his pathos. All manner of quest, poetic or otherwise, labors under the condition of pathos, but in order to sustain the quest the individual must envision some authentic terminus, some goal or principle of redemptive grace that will ground the quest and give it its direction. Milton knows what can fill his need. He is serene, not ravished. He is not driven by apocalyptic haste, for he knows that he can build mansions in

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eternity only by accepting the limits of his condition. Obedience and freedom are one. Collins, on the other hand, knows neither what can fill his need nor the mercy of time. Confined to the moment of passionate intensity and doomed to repeat it continually, he stands always at the crossroads, awaiting a momentous conversion. But lacking a medium at once answerable to his deepest thoughts and yet capable of leading him beyond his thoughts, he cannot transcend his isolate ego, and so cannot transform his spectrum of the Passions into Milton's "endless morn of light." More than anything else, however, he lacks what Coleridge meant by "Joy," that sublime faith in one's own Inner Light which enables Milton, from his eminence, to contain all points of view at once.

4. In Dreams Begin Responsibilities For Collins "rapture blind" propagates strong visions in addition to strong passions. There is, moreover, a general convergence of passionate and visionary experience in his poetry. It is as though he crosses a metamorphical threshold into an ideal world whenever he gathers into himself sufficient intensity, his passions transfigured into "dreams of passion" ("Ode to Pity," 1. 38). Some such transformational process figures prominently in the writings of Blackwell, Lowth, and Duff—those relentless celebrants of the "primitive" genius—and is perhaps fundamental to the myth-making consciousness, at least in its initial stages. Yet, as the period's greater topographers of imagination were beginning to realize with increasing clarity, the crucial issue centers upon neither passion nor the dynamics of visionary experience but upon the implications of vision as such: does it originate outside or inside the mind? Is it possible to transcend selfhood, and if so what does such transcendence mean? Is there a greater-than-rational or even divine faculty of the mind which encourages it to make contact with ideal forms? "There is something in the mind of man, sublime and elevated," writes Bishop Hurd, "which prompts it to overlook all obvious and familiar appearances, and to feign to itself other and more extraordinary—such as correspond to the extent of its own powers, and fill out all the faculties and capacities of our souls. This restless and aspiring disposition poetry, first and principally, would indulge and flatter, and thence takes its name of divine, as if some power above human conspired to lift the mind to these exalted conceptions." 1 But if Hurd approaches an ideal of poetry as generous as Milton's, Nec tu vatis opus divinum dispice carmen, Quo nihil aethereos ortus, et semina caeli, Nil magis humanam commendat origine mentem, Sancta Prometheae retinens vestigia flammae, [Nor should you despise the poet's work, divine song, which, above all things, declares the ethereal origin and heavenly ancestry of the human mind, preserving sacred sparks of Promethean fire.] ("Ad Patrem,"ll. 17-20) his emphasis on feigning (N.B. "as if. . .") betrays a scrupulous modern sensibility. Collins, who wishes to follow Milton and define the poet as

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vates, cannot help but agree with Hurd's estimate that the truest poetry is the most feigning. Always caught in the middle—between passion and doubt, vision and blankness, the sacred and profane—Collins treads nervously upon poetry's enchanted ground of myth and fable, his most innovative work exploring both the powers and limitations of the creative imagination. It remains for him to probe the depth of his estrangement from the happy pieties of his major precursors, and, by virtue of his participation in the dilemma he describes, Collins becomes the only writer of his era to elicit a genuine sense of what Keats terms "the Burden of the Mystery."

The "Ode to Fear" The "Ode to Fear" is one of Collins' most haunting and painfully burdened poems. Its primary vehicle for the evocation of mystery is personification. That personification should be employed to this end is not surprising: the notion that there is an intrinsic connection between prosopopoeia and visionary experience is a truism of most eighteenth-century criticism. But the extent to which this nexus is actualized in the ode may give pause to modern readers, for whom personification is a singularly unpromising literary strategy. Faced by this puzzling shift in critical judgment (I am tempted to say, in consciousness), we must carefully examine Collins' personification of Fear: is the startled intensity of response he generates owing to a transcendence of the limitations of personification, or is the ode to be regarded as a justification of the device? Before an answer can be hazarded we need to determine what kind of a personification Fear is. For although personification is virtually a universal feature of eighteenth-century verse, there is no such thing as a monolithic personification tradition, the latter being the invention of a naive or lazy historicism. One of the principal techniques available to Collins, the method perfected by Pope in his nonsatiric writings, draws upon the rhetorical potential of the figure, its capacity for lending vividness to abstractions. These abstractions may be moral, intellectual, or emotive, but in any case the prosopopoeia is not treated as an existing being in its own right, the world it inhabits a conceptual "reality" defined by the linguistic context in which it appears. 2 This mode, with its marked antimythological bent, was challenged by those eager to add a visionary dimension to the typicality of Augustan personification, thereby restoring its status as a species of radical metaphor. Representative of the bias of most apologists for forcible per-

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sonification is Joseph Warton's praise of "those living figures, whose attitudes and behaviour Spenser has minutely drawn with so much clearness and truth, that we behold them with our eyes, as plainly as we do on the ceiling of the banqueting house. For, in truth, the pencil of Spenser is as powerful as that of Rubens, his brother allegorist." 3 While it is true that elaborate pictorial delineation is a hallmark of Spenserian personification, its purpose is never simply to overwhelm the eye, as Warton seems to think. Spenser induces a rigorous examination of surfaces because he wishes the reader to attend to the larger imaginative structures they at once conceal and reveal: the vivid image is a product of visionary experience, the contemplation of meaning its essence. Warton's, however, is a poetry of the eye, infected by the same random or perverse curiosity which marks his antiquarian studies. Committed to theatrical dazzle rather than to the labor of internalization, he writes for the most part a highly artifactual verse in which the personified agent exists for the sake of the visualization, the idea for the sake of the image. It is patently a species of wit, a poetry which contradicts the mythological presuppositions upon which it is founded. Collins' Fear is subordinate to neither abstraction nor image. It is an intensely immediate presence, a questionable shape apprehended by an eye that has transcended the tyranny of common-sense perception (the "fixed" beholding of the "mortal eye," 1. 11): Thou, to whom the world unknown With all its shadowy shapes is shown; Who see'st appalled the unreal scene, While Fancy lifts the veil between: Ah Fear! Ah frantic Fear! I see, I see thee near. I know thy hurried step, thy haggard eye! Like thee I start, like thee disordered fly. (1-8) Despite the quadruple repetition of ocular verbs, Collins allows us to "see" nothing more of Fear in these lines—indeed, throughout the entire poem—than her "hurried step" and "haggard eye." Although the ensuing second-sight procession of Fear's attendants (11. 9-23) is ampler in visual detail, again Collins is careful not to satisfy our visual appetites, teasing us with visionary emblems befitting this unknown world of shadowy shapes: Danger howling amid the midnight storm; Vengeance lifting her red arm, exposed and bare. While recent scholarship has accepted the existence of a CollinsWarton line of personification, Collins' practice is generally more in

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keeping with the position of Burke, the age's foremost opponent of the ideal of vivacity. Collins seems to have recognized that an adherence to what can be seen by the physical eye alone represents a betrayal of the mystery of things, their "possible sublimity," the proper business of poetry being, as Burke claims, "to affect rather by sympathy than imitation; to display rather the effect of things on the mind of the speaker, or of others, than to present a clear idea of the things themselves." 4 Burke also directs us to an important antecedent of Collins' technique of visionary evocation. Considering the description (if description is the appropriate term) of Death's shapeless darkness in Book II of Paradise Lost, he writes: "No person seems better to have understood the secret of heightening, or of setting terrible things . . . in their strongest light by the force of judicious obscurity, than Milton. . . . In this description all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last degree." 5 Burke claims that this antimimetic style is the inevitable expression of a mind straining to the limits of its powers. Yet although suggestive, Burke's theory does not adequately explain the nature of this power of mind, or its limits. Nor can he teach us how Collins manages to avert the disaster of bathos—what there is about his "obscurity" that is "judicious." To understand what enables Collins to speak about the unspeakable, let us proceed beyond theory to the inner workings of the ode. And let us begin by considering Fear's ontological status. A clue is provided by the much-disparaged Mrs. Barbauld, who shrewdly remarks that Fear is at once an inspirer and victim of passion. 6 The personification, then, is an ambiguous compound of divine and human attributes, an intermediary power like a nymph (Fear is addressed as a nymph in line 47). This ontological bivalence, of interest in itself, is especially significant because of its bearing on the relationship between speaker and personification, determining the personification's structural role as the focus of a dialectical conflict within the speaker. The situation can be expressed as follows: that Collins can say he knows Fear is due to her humanity; she too is "unfixed" by her ghastly train (1. 25). However, as he beholds this awesome being from another world he also knows he is in the presence of a nameless terrible grace not to be intellectually or psychologically reduced, a power which the mind of man cannot humanize. Hence the peculiar amalgam of intimacy and estrangement in the speaker's relationship to Fear, and hence the uncertain, spiritual quality of this relationship—this liaison dangereuse. Reformulating our terms, we can define more exactly the tension inspired by Collins' vision of Fear. If, on the one hand, his sympathy is drawn out by Fear's alltoo-human vulnerability, it is perplexed by her apparent divinity; and whereas the former aspect of the personification establishes the possibil-

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ity of intimacy, it is the latter aspect, enticing the speaker with the dangerous allure of numinous experience and heightening his sense of self, that provokes him to seek out this precarious communion. Another, related dialectical factor is just as important as the ontological one. A slight alteration of our categories yields the following permutation of the intimacy-estrangement dichotomy: insofar as the personification is a power the poet beholds and endeavors to propitiate, it is substantive, external, an Other; yet insofar as Fear is answerable to an affective or imaginative state of the poet, his own fear, it is adjectival, a condition of immanence, an Other Self.7 Considering the general trend in Collins toward discontinuity, the most noteworthy feature here is the subjective or reciprocal element. In part determined by the kind of quality Fear represents, this pull toward mutuality is facilitated by a second, less obvious factor: the poverty of circumstantial detail noted earlier. Because Collins chooses to focus on movement rather than on an imposing object to be delineated, he avoids calling attention to Fear as a fixed locus of power and is thus free to intimate a shared intensity of experience. So thoroughgoing is this interchange of energy that by the end of the ode's initial section the activity of the personification is described from within rather than from without: "Like thee I start, like thee disordered fly." Still, although there is a diminution of dualistic modes of perception and cognition at the opening, it would be wrong to insist on the primacy of the self-sustained imagination. Collins knows of no access to Sublime experience except by means of a usurpation from without. The usurping force could of course be construed as a violence from within, yet identifying Fear solely as an anxiety projection is as damaging as reducing Urania to Milton's poetic talent. By failing to respect the supernatural context Collins wishes to evoke, such an interpretation cannot illuminate that competition of psychological and mythological perspectives which is one of the poem's chief glories (and, as I suggest later, a primary source of Collins' anxiety). Granted Fear's radically equivocal status, one cannot distinguish the precipitating factor in the ode: whether the personification determines the poet's feeling or the feeling the personification; whether the poet is reacting to a divine personage actually beheld in vision or to a figure of his own creation, a dark fiction integral to the mind. Suspended between these alternatives, Collins neither incarnates the god by merging with the self of his desire nor succumbs to passive adoration. Instead he expresses an intuition of proximity (I see thee near), seeking to participate as fully as he can in the life of his personification. Characteristically, he stands at the threshold, in a middle zone between epiphany and apotheosis, and the voice that speaks is one that

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has recovered a generic sense of the tensions that inform an I-Thou confrontation. If for Wordsworth personification is a false mediation blocking selfrevelation, for Collins—at least in the " O d e to Fear"—it is the direct obverse: his great achievement is a rediscovery of the existential basis of personification.8 Not only does he invest his goddess with a sacred aura unknown to Warton's lapsed divinities, but he redeems (or universalizes) the generalizing function Johnson applauded in the figure by reconceiving it, powerfully, in the context of privacy. The consequence of this dual restoration is a marriage of the archaic and the archetypal. I suspect that some such recognition is behind Hartman's comment that Collins "restored the psychological and ritual link" between personification and the daemonic persona, 9 a remark which takes on added significance when placed beside Dodds's analysis of the role of daemonic agency in Greek culture: "In general the inward monition, or the sudden unaccountable feeling of power, or the sudden unaccountable loss of judgment, is the germ out of which the divine machinery developed." 10 Interpretation of the ode's daemonic matrix best begins with a comparison to Milton's octosyllabics. I have already spoken of the naturalness and freedom which characterize these poems on every level—of the ease with which the poet-quester surmounts whatever fixations threaten to restrain his progress, of his confident, at times condescending attitude toward the goddesses he calls upon to do his bidding. Hartman acutely traces the Miltonic drama of the emergence of a modern imagination, passing from coercion to self-determination: "With Milton the spirit of Romance begins to simplify itself. It becomes the creative spirit and frees itself from the great mass of medieval and post-medieval romances . . . L'Allegro and Il Penseroso . . . show a mind moving from one position to another and projecting an image of its freedom against a darker, demonic ground. . . . The newborn allegoric persons retain . . . something of the character of demonic agents even while being transformed into pleasures of the imagination." 11 With Collins there is a striking reversal of the movement from grosser to purer inaugurated by Milton. Returning to the daemonic ground of romance, he projects the image of a nightmare realm of temptations and fatalities in which the persona is no longer in control of either his personification or himself. Accompanying this immersion in the archaic is a heightening of ritualistic structure and melodramatic incident, as well as a nervous, heavily accented, alliterative diction reminiscent of the exordia of the "Allegro-Penseroso" sequence, a link which underscores several deeper affinities between Collins' ode and the exordia. The "horrid

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shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy" spurned in "L'Allegro" all force their way back into "Fear," and with a vengeance. As does the "fixed mind" of the unquiet ("possessed") spirits banished in "Il Penseroso": for the shuddering persona of the ode exhibits a similar commitment to phantasmagoria, locked into an intense but starkly diminished world in which everything has vanished except those objects of perception that are immediately answerable to his obsessions. Such parallels may not be intentional, but when one considers this thematic reversal in the light of the ode's enormous formal debt to Milton's poems, 12 the possibility of deliberate revisionism is greatly enhanced. Yet admission of this intriguing genetic surmise raises a number of perplexing issues. Why should Collins be intent on contravening Milton's eminently successful strategy? Why trust himself to the relative crudeness of an archaizing mode, thereby surrendering so much of his autonomy and departing so radically from familiar nature and normative experience? I suspect these sacrifices were necessary. Collins requires a reversion to the archaic, and its attendant violence, because he is so much more profoundly estranged from his desires, and even anxieties, than Milton had been. Collins' extremity may be understood as a purposeful self-estrangement or self-limitation, a Dionysiac gesture aimed at abolishing the various Enlightenment constraints prohibiting intercourse between his actual self and the self of his desire. No doubt such extravagance leads to other, unwished-for types of self-estrangement, and Collins' ode, which often dallies with mere gothic hysteria, is not exempt from this charge. But certain risks had to be taken. To adhere to Milton's procedure of civilizing the daemonai would be to recapitulate the disaster of "The Manners" in which the poet is in direct contact with the recalcitrant material that is his greatest antagonist: the spirit of refinement or enlightenment. The way to freedom, from both his cultural anxiety and the anxiety of Milton's influence, is the venture of undoing Milton's poetics of purification, or sublimation. If Milton had secured his freedom from the past by setting the sweaty goblins of medieval romance to work in the cause of enlightenment, Collins can perhaps liberate himself by returning to those imaginative powers which, although displaced, had still served his poetic father. This return, then, involves at once an evasion of the parental and an embrace of the ancestral source, a reversion to the daemonic which is the common ground sustaining all visionary makers. 13 The enticement of Collins' undertaking is the promise of realizing an experience that affords at least the illusion of priority: the primal religious situation of the sacred terror occasioned by the chance, sudden encounter of the human with the divine.

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Usener, discussing the development of divine names, singles out the encounter with the daemon (or "momentary deity") as the oldest form of religious experience: "Whatever comes to us suddenly like a sending from heaven, whatever rejoices or grieves or oppresses us, seems to the religious consciousness like a divine being. As far back as we can trace the Greeks," he says, they subsume such experiences under the generic term daemon.14 Usener speculates that a daemonic confrontation can be initiated either by some surprising display of power external to the individual or by a spontaneous, overwhelming feeling that arises within the individual. In either case the daemon's appearance is coterminous with an experience of excitation or wonder, and in either case the daemon is manifested to consciousness as a deity ab extra. Building upon Usener and Freud, Dodds explains that an individual's unacculturated internal energies can acquire a fearsome, divine majesty because "unsystematized, nonrational impulses, and the acts resulting from them, tend to be ascribed to an alien origin." 15 The repressed returns, but the conscious mind perceives its disowned unconscious brother in a distorted and magnified form as a result of its withdrawal during the repressive process. Repression, moreover, persists even as the repressed image surfaces, and this continued expenditure of negative energy prevents the image from being accepted as a familiar spirit. The daemon's service as an unlocker of the unconscious (the "world unknown" to the conscious mind) should not obscure its oracular function of guiding the enthusiast into the mysteries of a world known only to prophetic madness. Not simply an oracle, the daemonic personification in "Fear" is a special type of oracle; for while it is an alien presence, the mind nevertheless recognizes it as one's own oracle, a kind of personalized genius loci.16 I quote from Hegel's examination of the Socratic daemon: "The daimon is still the unconscious, the external which decides; yet it is also subjective. The daimon is not Socrates himself, nor his opinions and convictions, but unconscious. Socrates is urged. At the same time the oracle is not external but his own oracle . . . The daimon is intermediate between the externality of the oracle and the pure inwardness of mind." 17 Kierkegaard, for once following his great precursor, comments on Hegel's analysis in a passage that has immediate relevance to our investigation: "This daimonic lies in the transition from the oracle's external relation to the individual to the full inwardness of freedom, and, as still being in the transition, it pertains to representation." 18 Suspended between internality and externality, humanity and divinity, in this encounter with the daemonic oracle, the individual experiences that unsettling yet elevating presence of an other in himself and of himself in

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an other which, for poets, is the essence of the muse-relationship. It is the muse, be it Fear or Urania, that endows the chosen genius with the gift of true vision and authentic speech. Dodds's account of Pindar's relation to his muse is apposite to the situation Collins presents: "It was truth . . . that Pindar asked of the Muse. 'Give me an oracle,' he says, 'and I will be your spokesman.' The words he uses are the technical terms of Delphi . . . But observe that it is the Muse, and not the poet, who plays the part of the Pythia; the poet does not ask to be himself 'possessed,' but only to act as an interpreter for the entranced Muse. And that seems to be the original relationship." 19 To the muse belongs the reflexive bodily gesture, to the poet the nonimmediate linguistic gesture. Fear corresponds to the nonreflective, which is a possession, and the poet to the reflective, which is a representation. What remains unexplained by the Pindaric analogue, however, is Collins' effort to pass from beholding to possession (en-theos), the excitement generated by his extravagant ambition to pass from re-presentation to self-presence. Unlike Pindar, Collins seeks to interpret or voice an image of his own daemonic self, a mute image of himself given over to passion, much as Milton does in his portrait of the transfixed, self-communing muse in "Il Penseroso." Yet if the ode discloses the drama of a mind endeavoring to transcend itself, it also reveals a mind which cannot help but be itself. Initially one is tempted to suspend all thoughts of what and whither, when and how, and would be drawn into the wild ecstasy of lines 1-8, but the attentive reader recognizes traces of another, reflective modality of consciousness which balks the urge for self-presence. This reflective consciousness is aware of the division of experience into real and unreal scenes, implores Fancy (the muse as such, as distinguished from the fearful muse?) to raise the veil separating the two realms, and yet dreads that she will do so. It has also plotted the ode's repetitive syntactical structures: Fear sees (11. 1-4); the poet sees Fear (11. 5-6); the poet recognizes Fear (1. 7); and he can thus liken his own experience to Fear's (1. 8). Does not this rhetorical strategy indicate a degree of deliberation wholly inimical to the unself-consciousness of "frantic Fear," belying the very continuity it wishes to affirm? I can only respond that this is one of the rare occasions in Collins when the spirit of calculation is a benevolent genius. For one thing, it helps to check the separative tendency of his imagination, implying a reflexive alliance between knower and known. In addition, the reflective tenor of the verse actually enhances the ecstatic element by suggesting a gathering intensity of participation in the muse's excitement: " I see thee," " I know thy," "Like thee I." What one discovers in these lines is the calculative genius not simply plotting, but plotting

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its own destruction. Reflection is precariously poised, straining to overcome itself, even as a painter might adopt the spectatorial role by standing back from his canvas while at the same moment be preparing to apply his next brushstroke. The next movement of the poem (11. 9—23) reveals some of the consequences of the dangerous imitation Collins has entered upon. It begins with a shudder of consciousness, as he finds himself precipitated into a panic-world where all is instantaneous, chaotic, sinister. Keeping in mind the ode's theatrical concerns, one can argue that this phantasmagoria does not transport us to a torture chamber or madhouse but is simply a series of tableaux vivants calling to mind the stormiest scenes of classical drama. Yet, although this interpretation is encouraged by the possibility of equating "the unreal scene" with the illusory world of the stage and Fancy's lifting of the veil with the raising of a theater curtain, it is precisely such rigid demarcations between "reality" and "unreality," audience and stage, that the violence of the poem's opening lines shatters. An initiate attuned to the frantic gestures of his goddess, the speaker may be compared to those Dionysiac revelers who constitute Nietzsche's prototypical tragic chorus. According to Nietzsche, the chorus is a community of visionaries who originate the drama by projecting their own fierce wisdom onto the world of the stage. In Collins, too, there is a simultaneity of seeing and creation, and as he beholds Fear's attendants the effect is less that of a curtain being raised than of a veil being rent, opening upon a purely interior abyss: the feverish, self-crippling visions of melancholy and madness. In Collins, however, there is no Apollonian completion or containment of energy, only a fitful catalogue of nightmare images. What he seems to be expressing is the predramatic delirium the votary of Fear must undergo before composing the scenes alluded to in the mesode. If this is so, to be a tragic artist is to be accursed, for he must feel in order to make others feel, and may thus become what he envisions: "Who, Fear, this ghastly train can see,/And look not madly wild like thee?" (11. 24—25). Is this not, in essence, the fate of Milton's devils, who both engender and are compelled to face "A Universe of Death"? Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, inutterable, and worse Than Fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceiv'd. (11.624-627) Does imaginative potency, then, necessitate a trafficking with the infernal, the deathly, the monstrous? Collins, for whom imagination is a

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hunger which preys incessantly upon life, is continually driven to explore the shadow side of Sublime experience. Early in his career, in the second of the Persian Eclogues, he offers his first night journey charting the terrors assailing the homeless imagination. The speaker is Hassan, a camel driver traveling across the desert toward a distant market, but although the time is noon, Hassan's extended surmise is an affrighted nightmare vision: he reads the lion's prints in the shifting sands, anticipates Death leading a procession of "gaunt wolves and sullen tigers" at nightfall, and imagines his sleep invaded by "some swoll'n serpent" and himself waking "to anguish with a burning wound." Confronted by these grim prospects, Hassan resolves to quit the desert at once. His retreat, as I read the poem, is a recoil of the selfhood astray in the desert of imaginative possibility. At the threshold of autonomous vision and yet illprovided, he can interpret his imaginative excess only in pathological terms. "Why," he asks, "was ruin so attractive made?" Wounded by his own surmises, he retraces his steps to the safety of Schiraz, a kind of devitalized Augustanland associated with peace, morality, wisdom, reason. But in the antistrophe of the "Ode to Fear" Collins reinvokes the maddening force from which Hassan, a typically baffled Sensibility poet, recoils: Thou who such weary lengths hast passed, Where wilt thou rest, mad nymph, at last? Say, wilt thou shroud in haunted cell, Where gloomy Rape and Murder dwell? Or in some hollowed seat 'Gainst which the big waves beat, Hear drowning seamen's cries in tempests brought! Dark power, with shuddering meek submitted thought Be mine to read the visions old, Which thy awakening bards have told. (46-55) Nowhere else is the radical bivalence of the daemon more apparent. The progression of thought here is truly remarkable. Collins begins by registering an awareness of Fear's enormous appetite for destruction. Yet once he ceases to brood upon external violence and turns in upon himself, the demon metamorphoses into a eudaemon, a liberating force heralded as a renewer of the poet's deepest energies. To be more accurate, there is a peripety-within-a-peripety in lines 53—55. At line 53 dread is ascendant over desire, the personification over the speaker, but with the switch to octosyllabics in the next line Collins seizes the initiative. Under the im-

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press of strong feeling, his supplication expands into a celebration of his own prophetic vocation. He has so thoroughly absorbed the rage of his dark angel that the daemon, no longer threatening the poet with engulfment, is viewed as a guide leading beyond itself to the special prerogatives of the prophetic seer: power (Fear's bards are "awakening") and strange knowledge (the ability to read "the visions old"). Yet if Collins longs for the condition of a blind visionary who feeds on darkness, one worries about the avidity with which he commits himself to the powers of darkness. The progression from "gloomy Rape and Murder" to William Collins is, to say the least, disquieting. It is not difficult to imagine how Pope, for instance, would respond to Collins here: he would doubtless relegate this selfhood-communer and his poem to some cramped recess in the Cave of Spleen. And not without good reason. Still, one might reply that for the poet as poet the way of Heathcliff is preferable to that of Edgar Linton (Pope's own successes being a case in point), that the prophetic imagination is, generically, involved with a fearful darkness—which must be faced, whatever the risk to the self. Collins' risk taking, however, remains an unsustained gesture. "Hither again thy fury deal," he bids Fear; yet at the next instant he holds back and implores her not to come too close, closing his eyes with holy dread: And, lest thou meet my blasted view, Hold each strange tale devoutly true; Ne'er be I found, by thee o'erawed, In that thrice-hallowed eve abroad, When ghosts, as cottage-maids believe, Their pebbled beds permitted leave, And goblins haunt, from fire or fen Or mine or flood, the walks of men! (56-63) Not only does the poem's argument waver at this point; there is a decided lightening of tone, perhaps indicative of nervousness, ill-suited to what comes before and afterward. I doubt whether Collins is simply resisting the urge to compound with his fantasies. If he is not wholly in command of his poem, there is reason to suppose that it is because Milton is directly impinging on his consciousness. Compare the above passage with these lines from Comus: Some say no evil thing that walks by night In fog or fire, by lake or moorish fen, Blue meager Hag or stubborn unlaid ghost

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That breaks his magic chains at curfew time, No goblin or swart Faery of the mine, Hath hurtful power o'er true virginity. (432-437) Aside from the fact that the delicacy of Comus—its playful blend of sophisticated and naive—is at odds with the ruggedness of the ode, there is something incongruous about the relationship suggested between Collins and the Lady. Presumably he is asking for a measure of the Lady's protective chastity; but whereas she summons her strength of spirit to resist the appeal of the demonic, Collins' expressed aim is to enlist such a power in the service of imaginative fulfillment. A backward glance at the Aeschylus stanza of the mesode should clarify the dilemma Collins is struggling with: Yet he, the bard who first invoked thy name, Disdained in Marathon its power to feel: For not alone he nursed the poet's flame, But reached from Virtue's hand the patriot's steel. (30-33) What matters about this curious portrait of a man at once fearless and fear-possessed is that Collins' Aeschylus has somehow managed to span the distance separating the Lady and Comus—or, to use Gray's categories, the good and great. To say, however, that Aeschylus represents a unified sensibility is misleading. Although resolving oppositions in his person, he achieves wholeness of being through a radical split between the man and the visionary maker. In other words, he is one who as an artist would see and know, and as a human being yet abstain. Collins, it appears, desires an exemplary self-division of this kind because, like Gray, he is beset by moralistic scruples. Lest he be rendered unfit for social existence, he would weave a circle around the aesthetic sphere— the domain of Fear—exiling there all his irrational, sinister impulses. Thus, in addition to being an imaginatively liberating force, the versatile daemon becomes a scapegoat figure as well. "The function of the daemon" in Empedocles, writes Dodds, "is to be the carrier of man's potential divinity and actual guilt." 20 Collins' creative anxieties are not so readily projected. He is a selfdivided being, but not in the way he wishes to be. His stance in the ode, roughly the opposite of Yeats's in "The Second Coming," is that of emotional acceptance and intellectual confusion. In part his confusion stems from an imaginatively stifling moral dualism, which makes him, in Kier-

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kegaard's peculiar sense, a failed poetic Abraham, one for whom "the ethical is the temptation." 21 Yet while a similar charge might be leveled against Milton—especially in Comus, where he indulges his own dangerous potentialities only to bully them into submission—these dark powers cannot be exorcised. Comus escapes to resurface in Milton's poetry under various guises—as palpable forms of evil and as subtler, more perilous temptations to the self—the balance in Milton being toward a confrontation with rather than an evasion of evil. As he sternly admonishes us in Areopagitica, "Look how much we thus expel of sin, so much we expel of virtue: for the matter of them both is the same." 22 Collins, however, seeks to preserve his soul unharmed, forcing a division between the sinister and the beneficent potentialities of Fear and thereby contradicting the daemon's most fundamental characteristic: its binary nature. But his basic error, from the Miltonic point of view, lies in his desire to dissociate the man from the artist. For Milton the Real Man is the Imagination, and any effort to isolate the aesthetic from the totality of human experience represents a betrayal of both man and artist. The poet who feeds on darkness must learn to gird his spirit against the powers of darkness, as Milton did. The necessity of such spiritual exercise is attested to by Collins' ode, for the forcefulness of the experience he is dealing with entails an inevitable transformation of the individual. Collins is clearly more attracted than repelled by the horrors he envisions, and the eagerness with which he accepts the call of the daemonic demonstrates that the kind of self-division he desires is not feasible. I think Collins' predicament in the ode is due more to the temptation of the Miltonic than the ethical. Earlier, in discussing lines 5 6 - 6 3 , I cited the section of Comus which seems to me Collins' starting point. Another passage in Comus may be just as important, enabling us to account for the injection of the issue of belief ("Hold each strange tale devoutly true," "as cottage-maids believe") into the ode. The benighted Lady is Milton's speaker: A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory, Of calling shapes and beck'ning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and Shores and desert Wildernesses. These thoughts may startle well, but not astound The virtuous mind, that ever walks attended By a strong siding champion Conscience. O welcome pure-ey'd Faith, white-handed Hope,

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Thou hov'ring Angel girt with golden wings, And thou unblemish't form of Chastity, I see ye visibly, and now believe That he, the Supreme good, t'whom all things ill Are but as slavish officers of vengeance, Would send a glist'ring Guardian, if need were, To keep my life and honor unassail'd. (205-220) The Lady, whose honesty at least I have never seen impugned, is a true believer. But what of Milton? Does he actually believe in the existence of the Lady's vision, in the Lady herself, in Comus or the Attendant Spirit? Probably the best answer is that this is the wrong question to ask. Milton can "believe" whatever he wants because of his generous imaginative faith that fiction prepares us for truth. Collins, on the other hand, can summon neither the Lady's naive nor Milton's sophisticated faith. The sequence of his thought is identical to the Lady's: from vision, to belief, to the security afforded by belief. Yet no sooner does he confront the middle term of this progression than there is a marked trivialization of his subject: apparently only children and cottage-maids believe the strange tales of Fear's awakening bards. Prophetic vision is reduced to the level of popular superstition, and insofar as vision is the only truth Collins possesses, he reveals himself as estranged from his desired mode of being, let alone from the innocence of cottage-maids. This uneasy alliance between vision and superstition is worth exploring because it is symptomatic of a major problem vexing Collins throughout his writing. The problem centers upon two possible attitudes the poet may adopt toward the beings of imagination: are they to be regarded as fact or fiction, awakening vision or mere projection? Rarely, as in sections of the "Popular Superstitions Ode," does he abide at the heart of the dilemma, and as a rule he is too nervous for a wholehearted choice of either the mythological or psychological perspective. He is too much a man of the Enlightenment to attach his faith to exploded superstitions and too much a studier of the nostalgias to abandon the materials of the old myth-making poets. Yet it is more than nostalgia which prompts him to adhere to a superstitious approach. Speaking of the horrific deities that haunt eighteenth-century verse, Spacks remarks that "one both wishes and fears such beings should exist"; 23 but how much more terrifying is the prospect if one accepts the principle that all deities reside in the human breast! Herein I think we touch upon the fundamental meaning

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of Collins' prayer in lines 5 6 - 6 3 . He is asking for the protective or mediatory power of myth. It is at once the innocent faith which sustains the Lady and the not-so-simple faith which upholds Milton even as he descends into the abyss of the self. Take away that faith, and what remains in the "Ode to Fear" but the fearful self, a mad or potentially mad poet? Collins' chief problem may be that he does not, really, believe in Fear, at least in the latter sections of the ode. Perhaps, as Peter Brooks suggests in another context, the poem is "hyperbolic because the . . . realm it wants to evoke is not immediately visible, and the writer is ever conscious of standing over a void, dealing in conflicts, qualities and quantities whose very existence is uncertain." 24 At the conclusion of the "Ode to Fear" Collins stares into just such a void. Both his visions and his daemon have fled, and he is quite alone now. Invoking the sacred name of Shakespeare yet doing so in a language adapted from Milton's octosyllabics,25 he again summons the influx of the daemonic: O thou whose spirit most possessed The sacred seat of Shakespeare's breast! By all that from thy prophet broke, In thy divine emotions spoke, Hither again thy fury deal, Teach me but once like him to feel: His cypress wreath my meed decree, And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee! (64-71) There may be some real courage in Collins' self-exposure, but there is certainly more of pathos than heroism here. We are left with a voice constraining a void, the urgency of the voice deriving from a blind effort to possess on the affective level what it already possesses. It is all too clear that Collins deeply feels the influence of fear, and equally clear that what he ought to fear is a loss of identity resulting from the cloudy, unspecified drive to which he yields himself. Collins' fear is that he doesn't feel, or fear, enough, and he fears that this may be owing to his lack of belief. In fact, however, there is nothing standing between Collins and imaginative realization except his own fears. Directly confronting his own imagination in the ode, he calls it Fear. But Collins' true demon is his own self-frustrated energy, a perverse desire masquerading as dread which shies away from the threatening space of absolute freedom. Fear, on the contrary, is a potentially liberating daemon, and is capable of sustaining the poet with the courage to endure heavenly as well as hellish visions.

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The Quest for Myth The "Ode to Fear" is a characteristic post-Miltonic poem in that it is haunted by the possibility of its own inauthenticity. Fear's dwelling place is the domain of Fancy, the sacred precinct Collins regards as his destined imaginative homeland, but intervening between Fancy's "world unknown" and the poet's desire to appropriate it is a fallen mind's knowledge that the "world unknown" is an "unreal scene." He prays that he may be able to husband within himself a faith as devout as that of the cottage-maids in his poem or of the great poets of the past. Yet for Collins such faith is to be purchased only by a self-forgetfulness that is impossible to sustain. His invocatory strain of address is thus countervailed by the goddess' resistance to his calling, and at the conclusion of the ode we hear the faltering voice of a poet who is riveted to his own tragic situation. As we have seen, it is no simple task to identify the various tragic elements of Collins' situation. If he is terrified by his own imaginative desires, he is also fearful of knowledge, and although the latter fear is less immediate and haunting, it is probably more fundamental. To accept the age's undeceiving insights would insure the blasting of his desires at the source, entailing a sacrifice of Fancy to the demands of Reason that would compromise poetry's capacity to be. Joseph Warton ascribes just such a sacrifice to Pope: "Good sense and judgment were his characteristical excellencies, rather than fancy and invention . . . his imagination was not his predominant talent, because he indulged it n o t . . . Whatever poetical enthusiasm he actually possessed, he withheld and stifled."26 While Warton's sharp dichotomy is a falsification, not only of Pope but of the creative mind itself, it also points to a disconcerting truth. There is imaginative exuberance aplenty in Pope's finest poetry, but alongside it there is a habitual reticence which thwarts the free indulgence of power. Like Swift, he admits mythopoeia into his writing only within a satiric context, and although Pope's adoption of the negative way is a brilliant strategy for a writer who believes there can no longer be, and probably never was, an accord of heroic substance and heroic style, it clearly indicates his own diminished freedom. When not armored in this manner, Pope is intent on resisting the allure of romance. He undergoes a willful disenchantment, taking pride in the fact "That not in Fancy's maze he wandered long,/But stooped to Truth and moralized his song" ("Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," 11. 340-341). But if Pope here reveals himself to be at once heroic and perverse, neither heroic nor strong enough to be truly perverse is the swarm of neoclassical poets—including such admirable talents as Parnell, Shenstone, and Tickell—who vulgarize romance by

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using its forms as adjuncts to polite moral and religious sermons. 27 Condescending to Fancy while stationing themselves securely on the side of Truth, these writers reveal far more tellingly than Pope the enormity of the modern poet's distance from the spirit of romance. At stake for Collins is nothing less than the survival of visionary poetry. He knows that in order to rival the achievements of poetry's rich past he must somehow reassert his faith in the numinous world which reflection would deny. While he does not, like Milton, possess a greater magic with which to subsume the parting and departed genii of tradition, he endeavors to restore their potency, at least within himself. To fulfill his aspirations, then, it is not enough to feel intensely—he must devoutly believe in Fancy's visions; as the "Ode to Fear" shows, feeling (the feeling of power rather than the feeling of need) and belief are coterminous. The mere will to believe, however, is not enough. Unless he decides to become another vacuous archaist, there can be no return to ignorant bliss. Can the enlightened mind accommodate the visionary forms of the past without compromising its honesty? The enlightened votary of Fancy does not simply court the danger of delusion. Collins wants to believe in Fancy's "unreal scene," but he does not want to suspend his disbelief willingly, to be cheated into belief momentarily. Belief must be habitual, an inward disposition to trust in the miraculous. Yet if it is true, as Johnson remarks, that "all power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity" (Rasselas, chap. 43), then Collins' pursuit of Fancy becomes a demonic quest in which the poet is attacked by an enchantress who inspires longings in him which cannot be fulfilled—unless he is willing to sacrifice his sanity in his quest for heightened consciousness. The great anatomist of madness in the Enlightenment, Michel Foucault, argues that what had been in the Renaissance a dramatic debate in which man confronted in madness the secret powers of the world becomes in the eighteenth century a conflict "which excludes all dialectic and all reconciliation." 28 "Madness," he writes, "is precisely at the point of contact between the oneiric and the erroneous . . . With error, madness shares non-truth, and arbitrariness in affirmation or negation; from the dream, madness borrows the flow of images and the colorful presence of hallucinations. But while error is merely non-truth, while the dream neither affirms nor judges, madness fills the void of error with images, and links hallucinations by affirmations of the false. . . . it links the dark content with the forms of light." 29 Is not this bonding of the oneiric and erroneous the essence of metaphor, of myth? It seemed so to Johnson, who was ever menaced by the precariousness of a reason that can be compromised, definitively, by the vanity of wishing, the fiction-making impulse. A skeptic cursed by a too-

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powerful imagination, he seizes on any limiting structure whatsoever to hold off the imminence of chaos, the idiocy of privacy. Contra Johnson, it can be argued that dread of the imagination's more-than-rational energy bespeaks too narrow a conception of reason and suggests that it is the rational in us which needs cleansing. Collins, who is unnerved by the age's notions of right reason yet lacks the speculative daring of a Blake to transcend its limiting categories, remains a stranger to this saving wisdom. But, although unable to silence the quarrels of reason and imagination, he is untiring in his efforts to establish a truce between these warring faculties. In an attempt to avert both delusion and the ravages of madness, he proposes a reconciliation of Fancy and Truth according to which the energy of imagination is tempered by the counterpoise of rationality. In other words, he is seeking a myth he can believe in, a myth that is companionable with truth, and in this pursuit he joins not only Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, but some of the best literary minds of his own generation. Thomson, Akenside, Blackwell, the Wartons, and Hurd are all inveterate matchmakers. Whether looking forward in hope or backward to an unreturning golden age, their attention is continually caught by various compromises of mood or mode or weather: of the superstitious and enlightened minds, the Sublime and Beautiful, Gothic and Grecian, the warm South and the cold North, East and West. To set forth the ideal of these writers I can do no better than to quote Thomas Warton's eloquent account of the Age of Elizabeth: . . . the reformation had not yet destroyed every delusion, nor disinchanted all the strong holds of superstition. . . . Every goblin of ignorance did not vanish at the first glimmerings of the morning of science. Reason suffered a few demons still to linger, which she chose to retain in her service under the guidance of poetry. . . . We were now arrived at that point, when the national credulity, chastened by reason, had produced a sort of civilized superstition . . . that period, propitious to the operations of original and true poetry, when the coyness of fancy was not always proof against the approaches of reason, when genius was rather directed than governed by reason, and when taste and learning had so far only disciplined imagination, as to suffer its excesses to pass without censure or controul, for the sake of the beauties to which they were allied.30 What it is about the Elizabethan period which moves Warton is precisely what attracts him and the great majority of his contemporaries to Milton, that giant figure straddling the Renaissance and Enlightenment, who had written:

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How charming is divine Philosophy! Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute, And a perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets, Where no crude surfeit reigns. (Comus, 476-480) Here we find the Second Brother responding to the eloquent idealism of the Elder Brother, and a sense of the difficulties besetting Milton's eighteenth-century epigones may be gleaned from the Second Brother's remark a little later in the masque: "Is this the confidence/ You gave me, Brother?" (11. 583-584). Not that Milton himself ever abandons his ideal of a poetry that is at once rational and enchanting, although much in his later writing betrays a harsh modulation of this ideal, but there is something inherently problematic about Milton's notions of Truth and Fancy which makes him a dangerous precedent. According to Frye, "The wedge driven by Milton between the 'true' Christian and the 'false' heathen mythology expands for the Augustans into a cleavage which almost destroyed mythopoeic poetry." 31 I will have more to say on this matter later in the present chapter; for the moment it is sufficient to recognize that Milton's Christian-true and heathen-false tends to become, for the Sensibility poets as well as the Augustans, a rift between truth (not necessarily religious) and false fabling. Collins, who wavers unsteadily between Nature and Fancy in "The Manners" and the "Simplicity Ode" and who identifies himself with Fear only after a violent forward lunge of the imagination into the "unreal scene," is but one exemplar of this tendency; others include Gray, with his dichotomy of good and great, and Thomson, who always stands irresolutely between philosopher and swain. To be sure, Milton is not the sole cause of his disciples' problems. Yet more than any other single figure, with the possible exception of Pope, he is responsible for the emergence of a generation of fine sensibilities more prone to admiration than to creation, given more to brooding upon the relationship between reason and imagination than to integrating them. The first of the Persian Eclogues is Collins' earliest attempt to discover a myth that will satisfy the demands of reason. Significantly, he launches his career by paying homage to the charmed realm of pastoralism, evoking a married land in which wanton gales play along valleys and pearls at the bottom of the sea are busily storing up the light of the sun, and of easy intercourse between the human and the natural. But it is not a perfect world; hence the need for the bard Selim, who spends most of the eclogue chiding the Persian maids for their neglect of moral virtue. "Well

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may your hearts believe the truths I tell" (1. 5), he proclaims, and as the poem proceeds his lecture gives way to a "L'Allegro"-inspired prophecy of the time when all the Virtues leading to Love will return and so restore their land to perfect bliss. No sooner said than done: the bard is blessed with a compliant audience, the Virtues respond to his invitation, and the poem concludes with a self-satisfied and self-conscious echo of "Lycidas": "Thus sung the swain . . ." Selim's effort to convert the Persian maids may be viewed, without too much ingenuity, as Truth's wooing of that undisciplined energy which imperils the delicate pastoral compromise Collins is seeking. He wants a world in which sense and sensibility can peacefully coexist. Underlying this desired union is Collins' ambition to reconcile enlightened Europe and the fanciful East, as is indicated by his characterization of himself as a "translator" in the preface. When Selim calls for a return of the Virtues, one also hears English Collins inviting the spirit of the East to resettle in his native land: O haste, fair maids, ye Virtues, come away, Sweet Peace and Plenty lead you on your way! The balmy shrub for you shall love our shore, By Ind excelled or Araby no more. (47-50) Unfortunately, Collins' poem attests to the difficulty of such a transplantation or translatio, which might explain his complaint in the preface that "our geniuses are as much too cold for the entertainment of" an Oriental elegance and wildness "as our climate is for their fruits and spices." Langhorne, with his keen appreciation of the authentically Oriental, pronounces the definitive judgment on the unstable compound of East and West in the Eclogues: "The scenery and subjects . . . alone are Oriental: the style and colouring are purely European." 32 The "First Eclogue" is for the most part a muzzled exoticism that admits "no wild desires" (1. 63). Despite a few genial imaginative flights, Collins labors, often embarrassingly, within the confines of the heroic couplet. The bard Selim, moreover, is unmistakably Pope's Clarissa—the presiding spirit over the disenchanted world at the end of The Rape of the Lock—in shepherd's clothing. The remaining eclogues lead steadily beyond the pastoral garden to a world more congenial to Collins' talents, a world also where Selim's facile accommodation of pleasure and reason is no longer practicable. In the second, Hassan is in danger of losing the paradise he has left behind, due less to the temptation of wealth than to the perversity of his own imaginings. Here the wanderer is able to return to his paradise, "recalled

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by Wisdom's voice" (1. 84). The "Third Eclogue," although considerably milder, presents a grim inversion of this flight-and-return pattern. The shepherdess Abra must abandon her paradise when the sultan of the realm is charmed by her beauty and conveys her to his court as his bride. Here, as public pressures have begun to take precedence over private pleasures, the fair fields are only to be revisited nostalgically as a respite from the cares of sovereignty. The fourth, a kind of antieclogue, fulfills the horrors anticipated in the second. Collins begins with a lyric interlude, lingering over the lost world of innocence much like Abra, yet goes on to depict in grisly detail a rape of paradise by invaders who blast the land, rend the hair of its maidens, and transform its shepherds into fugitives. We reach the climax of a movement initiated in the "Second Eclogue": the fatal impingement of actuality on the pastoral dream world. At first the antipastoral force is the gold which tempts Hassan's abortive quest; next it is the warrior monarch who abducts Abra to the greater world of city and court; and finally it is the Tartarian horde whose irruptive violence seems to represent an irremediable violation of both the pastoral bower and the pastoral consciousness. It would appear, then, that in the composition of his Eclogues Collins indeed discovered a myth that is compatible with truth: the story of man's falling away from bliss. Yet it is paradoxically a myth that implies the destruction of myth—or, to be more exact, the happy mythopoeic consciousness celebrated in the "First Eclogue." A farewell remark by one of the fleeing shepherds near the end of the "Fourth Eclogue" intimates Collins' awareness of this dilemma: Ye Georgian swains that piteous learn from far Circassia's ruin and the waste of war: Some weightier arms than crooks and staves prepare, To shield your harvests and defend your fair. (59-62) Here Collins is not simply counseling a graduation from pastoral to arms-and-the-man; he is addressing himself to the issue of his need for a larger imaginative structure that will defend him from the various forces which threaten all that pastoralism stands for. Such a defense, however, eludes him throughout his career, and in this he differs strikingly from Milton. "Lycidas," for example, is also concerned with the destruction of innocence, but this loss is more than compensated for by the realization of a profounder inward gain. Confronted by a charming pastoral myth that is a false surmise and an actuality abhorrent to the imagination, Milton comprehends these contrary possibilities within a greater myth that is at once charming and true. He redeems pastoralism by under-

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standing its imaginative permanence, and the shock of finding himself in a world unsympathetic to his desires is absorbed by a totalizing myth which enables him to accept his loss, which is nevertheless still shocking and painful. He can do so, of course, because—to recall the language of the Comus passage cited above—his poetry is not only charming and philosophical but divine as well, a fact which in and of itself might justify the ways of God to men. But, although sorely in need of some myth of miraculous restoration, Collins never avails himself of the large recompense afforded by the transcendent ''might of him that walk'd the waves." Milton's grand reconciliation of Christianity and actuality was already precarious, a staggering achievement given his historical situation, as Marvell's lines on Paradise Lost attest. Even Milton could not harmonize nationalistic and religious fervor, as Spenser had, rejecting in his later work a society that had betrayed its mission. Collins, on the other hand, turns to the public arena in his quest for a redemptive myth that will compensate his loss of paradise. I refer to the Progress myth, the only visionary theme he entertains with any frequency aside from his story of the trials of poetic incarnation. 33 It is a myth well suited to the greatly augmented historical consciousness of the period, perhaps the chief vehicle expressive of the age's aspirations and anxieties. In its most rudimentary and optimistic form it posits a Grand March of Intellect from ignorance to enlightenment which is seen to coincide with the geopolitical shift in cultural center of gravity from East (Egypt or the Holy Land or Greece) to West. As such, it gives a this-worldly orientation to the Great Chain of Being, drawing heavily upon the tradition of Christian millenarian thought but historicizing it by purging its apocalyptic or catastrophic bias, 34 and Anglicizing it, much in the manner of Milton in Areopagitica. Grafted onto this structure, especially in the writings of Whig and more radical thinkers, is the notion that the amelioration of society and learning is linked to the advance, or at least the presence, of Liberty. Liberty, according to this version of the myth, is regarded as a necessary precondition for the flourishing of the arts, particularly poetry. I need hardly add that most of these celebrants of political liberty are also advocates of poetic freedom, rejecting couplets for Miltonic blank verse or the Pindaric Ode and tending to affiliate themselves with Grecian originals as opposed to Roman imitators. Yet this espousal of freedom and originality gives rise to a fundamental contradiction which in part accounts for the greater uncertainty of these writers as compared to those belonging to the Augustan tradition. When Johnson, for instance, speaks of poetic progress he links the gradual refinement of poetic language to the growth

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in reasonableness of the national temperament, maintaining a historical, evolutionary approach. Members of the rival camp, on the other hand, find that their worship of the Muses of Inspiration rather than the Muses of Memory is not readily compatible with such an ameliorative schema. Their great hope is that the emergence of Liberty in Britain will render the nation an ideal environment for the writing of poetry. Yet they often seem desperately unsure whether they ought to conceive liberty as a civilizing or primitive force,35 their great fear being that the poetic freedom they desire is directly antagonistic to the emancipation from superstition they applaud as vital to the national well-being. The Progress myth, then, is a rich and complicated one serving to focus a great many contradictory impulses and interpretations. Perhaps the central contradiction is the fact that it is a myth, an Enlightenment myth which gathers to itself a sublime, religio-magical superstructure. Eighteenth-century progress pieces abound in such ritualistic devices as the invitation, the epiphany, and, most conspicuously, the triumphal procession of the divinity under consideration. In addition, the characteristically westward course of the Progress, following the path of the sun across the heavens, provides a link to cosmic forces. Understandably, writers dealing with the Progress of Poetry are most susceptible to this analogy, harking back to the classical association of the sun and poetry in the person of Apollo. Here we enter the charmed realm of romance speculation in which mythological, cosmological, and climatic imaginings—all revolving on an East/West or South/North axis—mingle promiscuously with the hopes and fears of the individual author. There were many who lamented their distance from the fiery South and wished themselves in lands "less northern, less remote from Deity" (Young, Night Thoughts, IX, 1607). But there were others who interpreted the sun's westering progress in a more positive light, valuing the destination as well as the source. They dared to hope that the genius of the Orient might be equaled or even eclipsed by the Northern or Western genius. 36 Feeding into this North / West theory are legends about the Hyperboreans and Hesperidean Isles of the Blest derived from antiquity, Mallet's scaldic ruminations, and a growing number of accounts of the libertyloving Goths and of the wizard Druids (those supposed teachers of Pythagoras and the Persian magi). The aggressive nationalism prompting these researches is an important development, important largely because it contributes to a revived interest in the native inspiration of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. 37 In the final analysis what matters most is not the particular orientation of particular authors—most, like Collins, steer a middle, or vacillating, course between the extremes of North and South—but the extent to which such speculations engage and stimulate

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their myth-making faculties. For many, the exploration of the origin and end of the poetical genius provokes a fresh start for the imagination, preparing the way for what is, in certain respects, a genuine progress of poetry. Much of the preceding discussion is relevant to Collins' "Ode to Liberty." The northwesterly procession figures conspicuously, occupying most of the first epode, but Collins offers an interesting variation of this pattern. Building upon the daring visionary scene at the conclusion of the strophe in which Rome, conceived as a giant-statue, is toppled off its base and shattered by the "northern sons of spoil," he sketches a Progress according to which the spirit of Liberty sweeps across those nations able to recover a fragment of this masterwork. The emphasis falls on continuity, on a continuous unfolding of the goddess' influence. To be sure, Liberty suffers a few notable setbacks, but Collins is determined to suggest a sustained, triumphal advance, so much so that he can be seen straining to hasten the goddess along her way with such Milton-inspired effusive interjections as "Strike, louder strike the ennobling strings" (1. 42) and "Ne'er let me change this Lydian measure" (1. 47). At the end of the epode this mounting excitement culminates in a singularly audacious epiphany: The magic works, thou feel'st the strains, One holier name alone remains; The perfect spell shall then avail. Hail nymph, adored by Britain, hail! (60-63) Now that Liberty has arrived in Britain, Collins suggests, the fragments of that antique statue have at long last been reassembled. It appears that after centuries of exile and wandering Liberty has reached a terminus and can henceforth reign securely as the guardian genius of England's shores. The antistrophe moves toward the same point as the first epode. But in direct contrast, everything preceding Collins' avowal that Liberty's quest has been fulfilled is set decidedly against continuity. He begins by recalling a time when England was linked to the European mainland and goes on to depict a great continental divide: Till all the banded West at once 'gan rise. A wide wild storm even Nature's self confounding, Withering her giant sons with strange uncouth surprise. This pillared earth so firm and wide, By winds and inward labours torn, In thunders dread was pushed aside,

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And down the shouldering billows borne. And see, like gems, her laughing train, The little isles on every side, A fair attendant on her sovereign pride: To thee this blest divorce she owed, For thou hast made her vales thy loved, thy last abode! (73-81,86-88) The full relevance of this backward-looking passage to the poem's argument is not immediately apparent, though certain difficulties are eased by recognizing the primacy of poetic over chronological sequence. Having traced Liberty's Progress to Britain, it is as if he now wishes to draw a protective ring around the nation. Not only is further advance forestalled by "Wight who checks the westering tide" (1. 85), but England's severance from the Continent provides insurance against a possible reversal of Liberty's Progress. I would add the important qualification that, like Milton's nationalistic celebrations in Areopagitica and the prologue to Paradise Lost, the imaginative exuberance of Collins' vision is probably governed less by political than literary considerations. As I have suggested in another context, Collins desires a "blest divorce" from France (the "now adverse strand" of line 67) and, by extension, the French-inspired Augustan school, in the interests of imaginative emancipation. Once again in the second epode there is a powerful retrogressive movement and an abrupt scene shift as Collins presents another symbolic vision of ancient British freedom. Here he tells of a Druid shrine erected to Liberty, a sacred spot embowered "Midst the green navel of our isle" (1. 90). This fane is an English counterpart of the strophe's giant-statue, and whereas earlier the banded powers of the North topple Rome, here Collins surmises that the Roman invader may have overturned this monument to British liberty. Yet, having acknowledged its destruction, he goes on to assert that the temple's celestial model can still be apprehended by the prophetic seer: There happier than in islands blest Or bowers by spring or Hebe dressed, The chiefs who fill our Albion's story, In warlike weeds, retired in glory, Hear their consorted Druids sing Their triumphs to the immortal string. How may the poet now unfold

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What never tongue or numbers told? How learn delighted and amazed, What hands unknown that fabric raised? Even now before his favoured eyes, In Gothic pride it seems to rise! Yet Graecia's graceful orders join Majestic through the mixed design. (107-120) Regardless of his overt intentions, what Collins has built for himself in some untrodden region of the skies is a Temple of Poetry, perhaps even an emblem of his own poem. Earlier he had said of the original Druidic temple, There oft the painted native's feet Were wont thy form celestial meet: Though now with hopeless toil we trace Time's backward rolls to find its place; Whether the fiery-tressed Dane, Or Roman's self o'erturned the fane, Or in what heaven-left age it fell, 'Twere hard for modern song to tell. (93-100) Collins here confronts the same dilemma he does in the "Ode on the Poetical Character." At the conclusion of that poem he attests to his vain pursuit of Milton's guiding footsteps. The kindred powers of Heaven and Fancy—yet surely not Collins' kindred—have overturned the inspiring bower of Milton's mountain paradise, and he finds himself in a heavendeserted age in which he must descend to the middle ground of the toiling moderns. In "Liberty," however, after noting the modern poet's distance from the sources of inspiration, he proceeds to envision an airy realm of heart's desire emblazoned by "nearer suns" (1. 124). The lines leading up to this ascent merit careful inspection: Yet still if truth those beams infuse, Which guide at once and charm the muse, The beauteous model still remains. (101-102, 106) Calling upon the charming power of truth as a guide, Collins exhibits a rare confidence in his own capacity for imaginative enlightenment. De-

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spite his misgivings—betrayed in line 101 by "if" and "still," which probably has temporal force—he does have his vision, and in denying, for once, the irreversibility of time, he formulates a basic principle of the myth-making consciousness. According to his position in the second epode, the imagination is capable of recovering paradise through the agency of an archetypal myth which encompasses both shadowy historical types and a truth transcending temporality. As in the "Ode on the Poetical Character," Collins' vision of the archetypal Poet's Paradise is inspired chiefly by Milton. The most likely source is "Mansus," where, in addition to a Druidic chorus who sing the praises of British heroes, we find Milton looking forward to congratulating himself on Olympus for a life devoted to the muses. Collins also appropriates much from Comus: relevant are the opening and closing addresses of the Attendant Spirit, Milton's earliest version of the tutelary angel-poet, who for a time dons the weeds of a pastoral bard before reascending to the bright pavilioned plains of his celestial paradise. Another possible antecedent is the description of the heavenly abode that awaits Lycidas, a passage in which Milton anticipates Collins by envisioning the celestial prototype of a lost earthly perfection. After telling how the sainted troops assuage Lycidas' loss, Milton calls upon him to extend a like generosity to all future wanderers in the perilous flood in his newly assigned role as Genius of the Shore. At the conclusion of "Liberty" Collins offers a not-so-finely-toned repetition of this Miltonic pattern. Invoking the singing-masters of his soul—now addressed as a "laureate band" and best interpreted as the great English poets of the past—he bids them "soothe" Concord to Liberty's train in order that peace may be brought to Britain's ravaged shores: Ye forms divine, ye laureate band, That near her inmost altar stand! Now soothe her, to her blissful train Blithe Concord's social form to gain: Concord, whose myrtle wand can steep Even Anger's blood-shot eyes in sleep: Before whose breathing bosom's balm Rage drops his steel and storms grow calm; Her let our sires and matrons hoar Welcome to Britain's ravaged shore, Our Youths, enamoured of the fair, Play with the tangles of her hair;

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These lines have elicited a good deal of critical response, most of it negative and focusing on the curious reverberation of "Lycidas" in line 140. 38 I acknowledge a certain infelicity here, but it is far more disturbing to see Collins hopelessly adrift throughout the entire passage. To discover that at the ode's conclusion Collins is addressing Concord rather than Liberty is astonishing, and while such a shift in allegiance is perhaps explicable in historical terms (presuming that the conclusion's emphasis on peace is colored by an alteration of England's political fortunes), I am more inclined to attribute it to the seductive power of Milton's influence distorting and sapping Collins' creative talents. Only now I think do we begin to perceive how terribly tormented in its depths this high-spirited poem is. A major source of confusion is a submerged, intermittent poetic allegory which is the ode's chief driving force and which frequently distracts Collins from his ostensible subject. In the final lines of the poem, for instance, Collins seems moved less by the possibility of political concord than his desire to be aggregated into the community of English poetic worthies. That is, he may really mean, or wish to mean, something like: ye laureate band, now soothe me to your blissful train in order that my ravaged fortunes may be repaired. This is admittedly mere conjecture, but I find it appealing in the absence of any internal evidence explaining how Collins' appeal to Concord is a suitable conclusion to a poem whose principal virtues are allied to an imaginative violence bordering on ferocity. In characteristic fashion, Collins reveals himself profoundly divided in his attitude toward such ferocity. The poem begins by depicting a positive act of violence, the slaying of a tyrant, which results in Athens' liberation. A comparable imaginative vitality informs the ensuing vision of Rome's destruction. Yet here the violence of the Northern invaders is given a negative cast, which is surprising not only because of Collins' habitual association of Roman and Augustan but also in view of his subsequent account of Rome as a destroyer of British liberty and his celebration of a union of Grecian and Gothic virtues. My best guess is that in the second half of the strophe Collins is recoiling from his own aggressive longings, his creative-destructive desire to topple the old idols which stand in the way of imaginative autonomy. He both wants and does not want a divorce from these idols, or is perhaps uncertain about what it is he

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wishes to liberate himself from, and this basic imbalance is reflected in the abrupt turns and counterturns of the ode. A possible explanation for Collins' persistent use of the Progress myth is that it holds forth the promise, however frail, of an escape from his predicament. If time is providential for the poet and there is such a thing as the Progress of Poetry, then one is guaranteed both continuity with and distance from the past. Herein lies the promise of a release from the burdens of choice and change, the agony of displacing one's ancestors and making one's destiny one's choice. Such a promise, of course, is not the exclusive property of the Progress myth, for the primary value of all mythic forms consists in their ability to guide the individual beyond or protect him from his thoughts. Collins, who wishes an easeful rite of passage for himself, readily succumbs to this enticement in "Liberty." Throughout much of the poem the individual yields his responsibility for making history to various mythic vehicles that serve as agents of destiny. Chief among these is the "wizard Time," an unlikely hero, who is explicitly named as the initiator of Rome's destruction (1. 65) and England's divorce from the Continent (1. 22). The trouble is that although Collins has found a myth to lead him beyond his thoughts, it is one which fails to stand the test of experience, and so leads him back to his problems. He may derive a certain amount of occult comfort from the epiphany that concludes the first epode, but at the end of the second epode he is still awaiting the appearance of his goddess, whether she be Liberty or Concord or Liberty-Concord. He knows, in any event, that his own individual quest remains unfulfilled. Accordingly, his basic attitude toward time is one of impatience, a disaffection with the natural course of events that is manifested both in the pathos of the conclusion and in his gravitation toward images of violence. It will be helpful to compare the "Ode to Liberty" with Milton's supreme defense of—and demand for—human liberty, Areopagitica. There is, in many respects, a profound spiritual kinship between the two works, and although I would not claim that Areopagitica is the principal "source" of "Liberty," there is evidence enough to suggest its direct influence on Collins' ode. Not only does Milton precede Collins in his praise of the Druids and in his desire for a wedding of British and Grecian virtues, but Collins' opening image may look back to Milton's vision of an aroused and rejuvenated Nation shaking its invincible locks, and his concluding appeal to Concord may be affected by Milton's plea for a "bond of peace" among the warring Protestant factions. Ultimately, Areopagitica is important for Collins because of its context of imaginative extremity, an exuberance that is most dazzling when Milton gives voice to his nationalistic fervor:

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. . . the favor and the love of Heaven, we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending towards us. . . . by all concurrence of signs, and by the general instinct of holy and devout men . . . God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his church, even to the reforming of reformation itself; what does he then but reveal himself to his servants, and as his manner is, first to his Englishmen?. . . For now the time seems come, wherein Moses, the great prophet, may sit in heaven rejoicing to see that memorable and glorious wish of his fulfilled, when not only our seventy elders, but all the Lord's people, are become prophets. 39 As in "Liberty," such zeal is rooted in a passionate desire for the millennium and an allied impatience with temporality. Milton shares with Collins the belief that the providential unfolding of history is revealed directly to the mind of the prophet. Present in both as well is the notion that historical progress is equivalent to reformation, the goal of this progress being the recovery of a lost, ancient perfection. Here is Milton's version of the story: Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on; but when he ascended, and his apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as the story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them. 40 One recalls the giant-statue of "Liberty," also shattered into a thousand pieces. In Collins the enterprise of re-formation entails a gathering together of these fragments, and it is implied that the completion of this enterprise coincides with Liberty's arrival in Britain. In Milton, however, it remains an ongoing labor. The difference between them is profound and further deepens once we take cognizance of the temperate, chastened voice of much of Areopagitica. It is this voice which reminds us in the midst of a glowing passage likening the progress of Reformation to the building of the Temple of the Lord: "When every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world." 41 Collins is compelled to register a similar awareness after visiting his celestial

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Temple of Liberty-Poetry, and thus trails off into the pathos of the conclusion: since the arrival of Liberty has proved insufficient, maybe it is time to invoke Concord. From the Miltonic viewpoint, his quest is doomed because his is not the active and vigilant questing Milton proposes for himself: "To be still searching what we know not, by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it, (for all her body is homogeneal, and proportional,) this is the golden rule in theology as well as in arithmetic and makes up the best harmony in a church; not the forced and outward union of . . . inwardly divided minds." 42 The final lunge here can be taken as Milton's ultimate judgment upon Collins' "mechanic" implementation of the Progress myth. Sin, not Time, as he remarks, wrought the first great change in human history (PL.IX.70), and all subsequent changes for the better are to be earned through the individual's incessant struggle with the various forces, primarily internal, that are resistant to progress. Without such a battle of contraries there can be no progression. 43 It is true that there is an abundance of contradictory impulses at work in Collins, but this internal warfare remains unproductive, rather like the conflict between God and Satan. The poet we encounter in the "Ode to Liberty" is a Blakean Prolific man who, in the absence of a Devourer, drowns in the excess of his own delights. Thus far and thus far only, in his commitment to imaginative wildness, does he internalize his subject. He remains unable to integrate the themes of individual and social liberty, perhaps because—unlike Milton, Blake, and Shelley—he lacks the presumption to set himself against the reigning political assumptions of his age. Hence, what he offers us is not a myth that is intimately concerned with the destiny of human nature, but rather a fond hope unrelated to the development of man's spiritual awareness.

The "Popular Superstitions Ode" Throughout his career Collins is unable to discover a subject answerable to his high ambitions or a mythic vehicle capable of absorbing his prolific energies. His failure stems in large measure from an inability to conceive a poetry sufficiently liberated from the themes and forms of the past to contend with the rush of new problems crowding in upon the modern artist. But despite his longing for concord with the "laureate band" of the past, he is a new kind of poet, and although it is not his desired subject, there is something in him which recognizes that his destiny is to define the imaginative stance of this new, relatively impoverished modern bard.

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There are traces of this theme in the Eclogues and the Odes of 1746, yet it becomes explicit only in the last and longest of Collins' odes, the posthumously titled fragment "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland, Considered as the Subject of Poetry." Here, as in the majority of his earlier poems, he is intent on dreaming of other worlds, and as so often before, his imaginative flight is checked by his realization of the conflicting demands of Fancy and Truth, power and knowledge. But now for the first time he is self-aware in addition to being merely self-conscious. Alternating between lyricism and meditative comment, he puzzles over the implications of the contrary reports of head and heart, his subject expanding to include an examination of art's problematic nature and, more particularly, the modern artist's problematic relation to his art. For all its tentativeness, the ode is an original and distinctly modern poem and stands as an important document in the history of the development of the English poetic consciousness. Collins seizes upon the occasion of his friend Douglas Home's forthcoming return to his native Scotland to establish the ode's structure. Everything turns upon the contrast between England and Scotland, as Collins gives a local habitation and a name to two contrary standpoints of the human spirit. The English spirit is most expressly revealed in the opening and closing sections. England is the habitation of the "gentle mind," the land of the social contract, the Englishman achieving selffulfillment through friendship and marriage. As Collins knows, the enlightened English mind is prone to scorn the untutored Scottish mind and to regard romantic Highland legends as "vulgar superstition." Suspended as he is between two worlds, Collins cannot help but share this condescending attitude, yet at the same time he urges his brother poet, who ironically has less of the true Scot in him than Collins, to return to his native land. Home must look homeward because England is no longer a soil congenial to poetry. The clear implication is that, despite Collins' efforts, the Progress of Poetry has not been checked, advancing to the northernmost part of Britain and leaving in its wake an enfeebled race of poets on the "southern coast" (1. 11). 44 For Collins, Scotland is "Fancy's land" (1. 20), a boundless imaginative public domain that anticipates Yeats's Romantic Ireland. In Scotland there is no division between real and unreal scenes; everywhere in Scotland is enchanted ground, and the writer need hardly exert himself to reap a continuous harvest: Fresh to that soil thou turn'st, whose every vale Shall prompt the poet and his song demand; To thee thy copious subjects ne'er shall fail;

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Thou need'st but take the pencil to thy hand, And paint what all believe, who own thy genial land. (13-17) In the midst of such plenty, the poet ideally becomes a compiler of local sights and legends, a strolling bard such as Blackwell imagined Homer to be. Collins eagerly assumes this role, roaming through the Scottish countryside—and within his roomy stanzas—as a mental traveler whose insatiable appetite is sustained by a steady diet of folkloric material, both ordinary and extraordinary. He emphasizes the need for receptivity, for an open and outgoing sensibility. An inexhaustible supply of subjects awaits you, he exhorts Home, ready to be tapped for purposes of imaginative renewal, if only you can overcome the inhibitions fostered by enlightened civilization. Not simply out of place in the Highlands, the enlightened mind represents a definite threat to its continuance as a haven for the imagination. Scotland's value to the poet has little to do with its rugged scenery or colorful customs, depending primarily on the fact (or, more precisely, on Collins' extravagant fancy) that it is a land of universal popular credulity in which the most fantastic far-off things are accepted as familiar matter of today: Where still, 'tis said, the fairy people meet Beneath each birken shade on mead or hill. There each trim lass that skims the milky store To the swart tribes their creamy bowl allots; By night they sip it round the cottage-door, While airy minstrels warble jocund notes. (20-25) Collins' recollection of the account of country life in "L'Allegro" is illuminating in that it underscores the wider significance of his celebration of Scotland. Romantic England may be dead and gone, but its spirit abides in Scotland, and so Collins' journey northward is also a movement backward in time, a journeying back to the source. Like the great poets of the Renaissance, the Scottish bard Collins envisions is to sustain the "rural faith" (1. 32) because it is only with the sanction of popular belief that a writer could speak out as boldly as the young Milton: I'll tell ye; 'tis not vain or fabulous, (Though so esteem'd by shallow ignorance) What the sage Poets taught by th'heav'nly Muse Storied of old in high immortal verse Of dire Chimeras and enchanted Isles,

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And rifted Rocks whose entrance leads to Hell, For such there be, but unbelief is blind. (Comus, 513-519) Collins relates that such fabulous stories continue to be passed on from generation to generation in the far north: Even yet preserved, how often may'st thou hear Where to the pole the Boreal mountains run, Taught by the father to his listening son Strange lays, whose power had charmed a Spenser's ear. (36-39) Of special interest in these lines is Collins' rendition of an English literary history that might have been. What is this world of benign influence, one in which older poets are the guides and guardians of their progeny, if not a fond and fanciful vision of what England could still be had there been no Enlightenment and thus no radical severance of popular and sophisticated thought? In the demon-haunted middle stanzas of the ode, as he penetrates deeper into the countryside, we hear a number of strange tales Collins has learned from both popular sources and his English singing-masters, primarily Milton. There is the legendary water kelpie, a descendant of Comus and Satan, that tempts a "luckless swain" to the fate of the drowned Orpheus in "Lycidas." We are also introduced to a band of mighty Viconian wizards, both blessed and cursed with the gift of second-sight: 'Tis thine to sing how, framing hideous spells, In Skye's lone isle the gifted wizard seer, Lodged in his wintry cave with , Or in the depth of Uist's dark forests dwells; How they, whose sight such dreary dreams engross, With their own visions oft astonished droop, When o'er the watery strath or quaggy moss They see the gliding ghosts unbodied troop. (53-60) The allusion to the "Nativity Ode," where "the flocking shadows pale/ Troop to th'infernal jail" (11. 232-233), alerts us to a basic methodological principle of the ode. Resurrecting many a fallen Miltonic demon, Collins is intent on reversing the pattern of Milton's sacred hymn, just as he had been in the "Ode to Fear." But while in the earlier poem Collins was in much the same position as these afflicted bards, here he is shielded

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from the imagination's "withering power" by a saving distance, at once literal (since Collins is of course not in Scotland) and aesthetic. Having found a subject other than himself, he can channel his demonic energy into a form which resembles myth in its capacity for separating the individual from his more dangerous imaginings. But if this is all to Collins' advantage, one nevertheless misses the complicated torments of "Fear," most notably the speaker's often strenuous resistance to the appeal of the demonic. There are some memorable passages in these middle stanzas which find Collins captured by the spell of his legendary material, but as a rule he adheres too closely to the letter of his sources, which means that he is too distant from their spirit. To be sure, the great poets of English tradition were in touch with popular superstitions, yet they were never mere recorders of them, as Collins advises Home to be (11. 185-187). Home is not urged to emulate Skye's wizard seers: to do so would be too dangerous; besides, Collins knows he and his friend are too much men of the Enlightenment to fabricate their own fantastic legends. But this is not all he realizes. In stanzas 11 and 12 his acknowledged distance from the source provokes self-questioning. Here are the crucial passages: Nor need'st thou blush that such false themes engage Thy gentle mind, of fairer stores possessed; For not alone they touch the village breast, But filled in elder time the historic page. There Shakespeare's self, with every garland crowned, In musing hour his Wayward Sisters found In scenes like these, which, daring to depart From sober Truth, are still to Nature true, And call forth fresh delights to Fancy's view, The heroic Muse employed her Tasso's art! Prevailing poet, whose undoubting mind Believed the magic wonders which he sung! Hence at each sound imagination glows; Hence his warm lay with softest sweetness flows; Melting it flows, pure, numerous, strong and clear, And fills the impassioned heart and lulls the harmonious ear. (172-177, 188-191, 198-203) There is much to be unriddled here, and I would like to begin by considering these lines as a regular stepping of the Imagination toward a Truth,

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as Spacks does: "Collins suggests that scenes which depart from 'sober truth, are still to nature true,' that imaginative insight is for poetic purposes superior to more prosaic clear-sightedness. . . . it [the ode] represents the solution to his dilemma. . . . in it he can assert, more emphatically than ever before, total commitment to the values of the imagination." 45 I think I do no violence to her argument by quoting her out of context, this time on Burke: "Such emphasis on the intrinsic value of the emotions derived from contemplation of the supernatural makes finally irrelevant the problem of whether the unearthly can be believed in." 46 According to Spacks, then, the issue for Collins is not the truth or falsity of fiction but its capacity to elicit feeling. The imagination cannot be wrong because its creations are purely hypothetical; even if they are erroneous, they are not lies. Hurd approaches such a justification of imaginative excess in his boldest proclamation of poetic faith in Letters on Chivalry and Romance: "Let others explain away these wonders so offensive to certain philosophic critics. They are welcome to me in their own proper form, and with all the extravagance commonly imputed to them. . . . Does any capable reader trouble himself about the truth, or even the credibility of their fancies?" 47 "Alas, no" is Hurd's telling reply; the author of the generous credo cited above is the same author who in the same work takes such perverse delight in rationalizing away the poets' lies: Homer's Cyclops is really a bandit, the giants of Gothic romances are oppressive feudal lords, knights born of fairies are bastards, and so forth. Collins, too, is not Wallace Stevens, and is probably no less self-divided than Hurd or his friend Thomas Warton, who writes, "In reading Spenser if the critic is not satisfied, yet the reader is transported." 48 Consider the assertion that the poets' fictions, though "daring to depart/From sober Truth, are still to Nature true." Is Collins' position that of Addison, who says of Shakespeare's supernatural figures that "we cannot forbear thinking them natural. . ." and "if there are such Beings in the World, it looks highly probable they should talk and act as he has represented them" (Spectator No. 419)? Or is he enjoining a view of romance as allegory, in which case its illusions would lead us back to the reality of "sober Truth"? Even if he is urging an appreciation that romantic fiction is truer to human nature than sober Truth because it is responsive to our unlimited imaginative desires, his claims are highly qualified. He begins in stanza 12 by stating that the prevailing poet is one who dares to depart from sober Truth. Nevertheless, he goes on, the poet's false themes are "to Nature true" and (therefore?) "call fresh delights to Fancy's view." Tasso is enlisted as a case in point. He is a gifted poet able to command the reader's imagination. But why? Because his "undoubt-

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ing mind / Believed the magic wonders which he sung." This directly contradicts the initial declaration of the stanza; for if Tasso believed his fictions were facts, his departure from sober Truth was unintended and thus involved no daring. The question of daring is applicable only to the enlightened artist, and since Collins himself believes that the magic wonders of the older poets are false themes, he seems to have reached an impasse. A rigorous pursuit of his logic leads to the following dismaying conclusion: the romantic element in art is permanent so far as the reader is concerned; for the modern writer, on the other hand, the universally appealing superstitions of art are archaic forms. Logic, however, does not tell the whole story. For the most part, Collins occupies a position midway between the archaic and archetypal throughout the ode, in terms of both theory and practice, and while this may be an uncomfortable position for him, his discomfort is productive of insight. Forced to feel, think, and worry more intensely than any mere archaizer, he arrives at a new and deepened understanding of the equivocal relationship between fiction and truth. In part Collins' turmoil can be traced to a misreading of his great English precursors. Since they are so much more self-assured than he is they seem to him naive, whereas in fact their works are exceptionally sophisticated testings of the uncertain connections between fiction and truth. In Milton, especially, these relations tend to be strained, and his difference from Collins is worth defining. Our best guide here is Hartman, who observes that Milton "is important for Collins and the Romantics because he shows the enlightened mind still emerging, and even constructing itself, out of its involvement with Romance. He marks the beginning of modern Romanticism, of a romantic struggle with Romance." 49 Milton differs from Collins in that for Milton the enlightened and superstitious minds are not inherently antagonistic parties. The Miltonic struggle with romance is conducted within the framework of romance itself, for to Milton romantic themes are not necessarily false themes. Yet it is important to recognize that after Comus Milton is not so imaginatively generous a poet as his own great original, Spenser, whose expansive syncretic method permits a remarkably fluid continuum of Christian and pagan materials. In Paradise Lost Spenserian horizontality is forsaken for an often austerely hierarchical myth-making. Pagan myths are consigned to an illustrative role, appearing indirectly via the allusion and epic simile, and for all their loveliness must be denounced as false themes: "thus they relate / Erring" (1.746-747). But although exposing their falsehood, Milton does not, and perhaps at this point could not, relinquish pagan modes of thought. They can be accommodated to Mil-

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ton's extravagantly romantic superstructure because the inspired prophet is in possession of a divinely sanctioned myth that at once annuls and fulfills the errant surmises of the ancients. Paradise Lost is thus both antiromance and superromance, and its author is not compelled to opt for either false themes or sober Truth. Still, in its closing books Paradise Lost adumbrates the severe turning away from romantic themes, the movement from dulce to utile, of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. How can this be accounted for? Not, surely, by a loss of self-confidence on Milton's part. Nor can it be attributed solely to the increasing pressure of experiential evil weighing upon him. Milton seems to have become persuaded that his affection for pagan literature and the splendor it represented was a treacherous spiritual temptation. Already in Paradise Lost there is an uneasy alliance between power and error, suggested chiefly by the parallels between Milton and his Satanic antiself; in Paradise Regained power becomes the power of resistance, the poet exercising what Johnson terms "the power of art without the show" ("On the Death of Dr. Levet," 1. 16); and in Samson Agonistes there is often a contempt for power, especially the power of speech, as though Milton too is repenting having betrayed his secret.50 Another consideration remains to be noted. It can be said that he redeems both Christian and pagan myth by internalizing them, transvaluing their palpable spirit realities as psychic realities: the paradise within, the hell within, the inner light. In so mythologizing the inner life, he is of course true to human nature, "to Nature true." But at the same time he contributes to the departure of the false themes he loved so deeply, preparing the way for a poetry that purges still further the superstitious element of romance in its movement from sacred myth to allegory addressed to the intellectual powers. While Collins does not participate in this heroic Romantic purgation of romance, he anticipates the great Romantics in a number of important ways in the "Popular Superstitions Ode." Aside from stanzas 11 and 12 what seems to me much the most promising section is the account in stanza 10 of "Kilda's race," a people living in "primal innocence" despite their harsh, barren surroundings. We find a new directness in Collins here. Absent is his often cumbersome personification machinery. No forceful images possess his consciousness. He is not, for once, concerned to call attention to an explicitly sacred event. Although he does not begin in strength, invoking a series of sentimental commonplaces, once beyond these his treatment of this rather ordinary subject reaches a nearvisionary intensity:

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Their bounded walks the ragged cliffs along, And all their prospect but the wintry main. With sparing temperance, at the needful time, They drain the sainted spring or, hunger-pressed, Along the Atlantic rock undreading climb, And of its eggs despoil the solan's nest. Thus blest in primal innocence they live, Sufficed and happy with that frugal fare Which tasteful toil and hourly danger give. Hard is their shallow soil, and bare; Nor ever vernal bee was heard to murmur there. (161-171) Tamed by their environment, the Kildans are a people who have regained their innocence in a post-Edenic world, a people made strong by working with, and in spite of, what nature affords them. The link to Collins' own situation is intriguing, especially in view of his recollection in stanza 10 of the antistrophe of the "Ode on the Poetical Character." In the earlier poem Milton's mountain paradise is piled up to heaven, but here the only prospect is the wintry main; there the holy genii of the mount unlock its springs, but here the springs are drained by stinting laborers; there Collins is driven in despair from his desired dwelling place, but here the people of Kilda adapt themselves to a world that is not very far from being a universe of death. Can we assume, then, that this is Collins' "argument . . . more heroic" than romantic themes (PL. IX. 13—19), that he is intimating his willingness to accommodate himself to a demystified world, accepting what will suffice rather than straining after an impossible perfection? 51 It seems to me unlikely, at least if we keep in mind the entire context of the ode. It is in many respects the most despairing of Collins' many songs of desperation, filled with some extremely ominous personal declarations and obsessed with images of victimization. He is indeed resigned to his destiny, yet bitterly, hopelessly resigned. Balked in his efforts to enumerate old themes, he is either unwilling or unable to "lie down where all the ladders start, / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart" (Yeats, "The Circus Animals' Desertion," 11. 39-40). He does not pursue the implications of his genuine speculative and imaginative breakthroughs, not perceiving that his internal struggle is an essential part of the poetic process rather than a merely personal torment. For Collins never comprehends, as do Milton and the Romantics, that his own personal history, in its totality, might serve as the starting point for a coherent body of poetry at once mythical and true.

5. Α Poetry of the Evening Ear Near the end of Paradise Lost Michael informs Adam that he and Eve have forfeited their high eminence and must henceforth "dwell on even ground" (X 1.348). Collins, at times, seems ready to accept this hard counsel, renouncing his feverish pursuit of Milton along the heights and descending to a less jealously guarded even ground where he courts a superbly gentle muse of the Evening ear: "O teach me softer sounds of sweeter kind" ("Lines Addressed to James Harris," 1. 5). This descent, however, does not signal an abandonment of Milton. As the poet of Evening, Collins transfers his allegiance from Miltonic sublimity to Miltonic tenderness, dreaming his way back to Milton's pastoral world. Accordingly, there is a change in the quality of Milton's influence. Purged of his severity, Milton ceases to be a withering force which traumatizes Collins and crowds him out, becoming instead a benign presence from which he is able to draw inspiration, a responsive voice he calls out of silence. It is only by adopting a decidedly un-Miltonic attitude toward pastoral that Collins experiences such generous influence. Milton, despite his temperamental affinity for pastoral, is never as comfortable with it as Spenser. He launches his prophetic career in "Lycidas" by shattering the timeless recurrence of pastoral artifice, and although he lovingly reverts to it throughout the poem, pastoral has assumed the status of a lost or mourned object, an outmoded fiction which is recognized as such. At best it is a premature "guess at Heaven," at worst a distraction from the spiritual service demanded of the warfaring Christian poet in an ungodly and prosaic world. Milton inaugurates the, at times, redemptive degradation of pastoral from Renaissance high artifice to eighteenth-century technologized Georgic and Cowperian "task." Collins, however, shuns the rigors to which Milton opened up the pastoral mode, refusing to conceive it as an antechamber to experience or "something like Prophetic strain." Whereas he often enhances daemonic or ecstatic elements in Milton, in his Evening poems he isolates and purifies whatever is gentle in Milton. They are a methodological interposition of ease: if Milton is soft, Collins is supersoft; and if Milton proceeds with "ev'n step, and musing gait," Collins muses still more slowly and deliberately. Something is lost by virtue of this curtailment—the potential for deification or devastation that energizes his Sublime odes—but it is not so drastic as to exclude numinous or visionary possibilities. Occasionally, as

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in the "Ode to Evening," these threaten to erupt, abandoning Collins to his anxieties, and while the temptation to range beyond even toward daemonic ground is scrupulously resisted, it is never completely subdued. For all its delicacy, Collins' Evening realm, like all of his art, is founded upon an unappeasable terror. It is paradise revisited, but with the crucial difference that it is a post-Miltonic paradise of spectral confrontations, haunted by strange images of death and disorder. The marvel is how beautifully Collins manages to sublimate this fearful potential.

Nature and Melancholy Amy Reed accurately observes that by the middle of the eighteenth century "there is an association well established . . . between the description of nature and either pensive or gloomy reflection."1 How can we account for this remarkable phenomenon? It is helpful to remember that an important source of "11 Penseroso," the prime antecedent of Collins' Evening mode and the great mass of the period's meditative-descriptive verse, is Burton's advice that a country walk is a good antidote to black melancholy. Burton's prescription is much better suited to Milton's eighteenth-century progeny than to his own ambulatory sage. In Milton there is a convergence of nature-feeling and pensiveness, but there is no trace of gloom. For him melancholy is a heightened self-awareness that scarcely weighs, a melancholia generosa,2 and the companionable nature he passes through is a place of soul making. Such writers as Anne Finch, Parnell, Young, Thomson, Gray, the Wartons, and Collins exhibit a melancholy that is far more burdensome and solipsistic. What happens when these introspective brooders, prompted by Milton, venture out-of-doors? They tend to vacillate between depression and ecstasy, but an ecstasy which betokens things-in-their-farewell, the type J. H. Van den Berg ascribes to Rousseau: "His emotion was the sort felt by a mother when her child goes out alone for the first time." 3 These poets are trapped in a maddening cycle: their melancholy is largely a consequence of their rupture with immediacy, and the nature they turn to for support and sympathy is a landscape of estrangement that intensifies their isolation and feeds their gloom. Nature poetry becomes intrinsically elegiac, a poetry of nostalgic longing in which celebration (of the lost object) and lamentation (for the mourning subject) are indistinguishable. Modern nature poetry, according to Hartman, is rooted in death: "Poems about place (locodescriptive) merge with meditations on death so that landscape becomes dramatic in a quietly startling way. . . . Not only

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is the graveyard a major locus for the expression of nature sentiment, but Nature is herself a larger graveyard inscribed deeply with evidences of past life."4 Contemplating the renowned or anonymous dead, as well as his own mortality, the elegist catches an intimation of a human presence in nature, a deep-buried life that he may contact, listen to, even learn from. Where the turf "heaves . . . in many a mould'ring heap" (Gray's "Elegy," 1. 14) nature is secretly animate, intimate. Thus, nature comes alive in a curiously indirect manner. The estranged external world of the Enlightenment, seemingly deprived of the possibility of transcendence, is again filled with presence, but it is the presence of loss, of loneliness and death. Loss is sublimated or dies into an elegiac lyricism that confers on nature the individual's sadness. Since this is an unfathomable, unspeakable sadness, the individual's new-found intimacy with nature is highly precarious. For it is the intimacy of a mystery. The estrangement of things has become the strangeness of things, and in its dramatization all is resistant to direct treatment. Such perplexed obliquity is the hallmark of Collins' Evening poetry, which renders a mood or atmosphere rather than a landscape, a region of half-felt, half-imagined impressions of subterranean life that elude descriptive clarity. In "How Sleep the Brave" he evokes a ghostly nature compounded of the earthy (mould, sod, turf, clay) and aerial: "By fairy hands their knell is rung,/By forms unseen their dirge is sung" (11. 7-8). It is as if the slumbering dead, though rooted in earth, can still dream; or else their presence causes nature to dream, or become fanciful. Not only fairies and invisible forms (spirits or birds?) but Spring, Freedom, and the pilgrim Honor flock to their gravesite. In "A Song from Shakespeare's Cymbeline" Fidele's "grassy tomb" is visited (or haunted) by folkloric shepherd lads and melting virgins, female fays, and the redbreast, a bird of twilight that offers its natural ministration. The mood of these poems is sustained by a tenuous and uncanny alliance of the natural and supernatural. Usually Collins hovers delicately between the two, as in the "Ode, to a Lady on the Death of Colonel Ross," where we encounter a shade (1. 18) that is either natural or ghostly and the surprising phrase "blooming guest" (1. 30), an epithet for the fallen hero but also a veiled reference to the flowers that will be manured by his corpse. The subtle visionary suggestiveness of this verse is the feature which sets Collins apart from his contemporary rivals in the penseroso mode. Gray, for instance, has nothing of the romance element in Collins: the sense that the grave is a "sacred spot" ("Colonel Ross," 1. 16), a forcefield of powerful spiritual influence. The dead beneath the heaving turf in the "Elegy" do not haunt the countryside; they come to life only through the ruminative surmises of their celebrant. What Gray lacks is, to use

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Arnold's term, "natural magic." Collins' poetry, of course, is saturated with magical images, but it is only in his Evening realm that real and unreal scenes merge to produce a natural magic such as Arnold has in mind. Essential to this naturalization of the magical is Collins' transformation of potential "graveyard" eeriness into the charm of an aesthetically distanced artifact. He is consistently low-key. The mourners welcomed in the "Cymbeline Song" are countryfolk, female fays, and the redbreast; yet there is an exorcism of demonic (nighttime as opposed to twilight) powers. No wailing ghost shall dare appear To vex with shrieks this quiet grove, No withered witch shall here be seen, No goblins lead their nightly crew. (5-6, 9-10) Style, however, is the chief exorcist in Collins' Evening mode, an elegant formal restraint that prevents the uncanny from asserting its presence apart from the tempering influence of the canny. It is worth noting that despite various reverberations of Milton, the idiom and form of "How Sleep the Brave," the "Cymbeline Song," and the ghostly "Young Damon of the Vale is Dead" are not really "Miltonic"; they are primarily modeled on Shakespearean lyricism, though they also bear the imprint of the Greek Anthology and native ballads. Collins seems to have developed his Evening mode independent of Milton, and yet his greatest achievements in that mode are directly indebted to Milton. Without Milton Collins could not have perfected the poetry of the Evening ear, but without drawing upon these other, milder sources he might not have been able to deal with Milton so effectively. Turning to them served as a means of deindividuating and thereby mitigating the Miltonic presence which overshadows the "Ode Occasioned by the Death of Mr Thomson" and the "Ode to Evening."

The "Thomson Elegy" The "Thomson Elegy" most strikingly reveals how Collins attempts to come to terms with, or defend himself from, Milton by refusing to look beyond the pastoral perspective. Not unexpectedly, the poem's great original is "Lycidas," from which it derives much of its imagery and phrasing. 5 Also coming from "Lycidas" is the elegy's association of watery and rural, which are artfully conjoined via Collins' central organiza-

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tional device, perhaps adapted from the ambulatory motif of "L'Allegro"-"Il Penseroso": a boat excursion up the Thames to Thomson's "sylvan grave" at Richmond. As Edward King is an embodiment of the pastoral spirit, his death a "loss to Shepherd's ear" of the harmonious music of innocent nature, Thomson is presented as a pastoral singer at whose death Nature loses, the Thames becoming a "lorn stream, whose sullen tide / No sedge-crowned Sisters now attend" (11. 29—30). Although consonant with elegiac convention, the characterization of Thomson as "meek Nature's child," like Milton's characterization of Shakespeare in "L'Allegro," is also a misrepresentation of Thomson's authentic talent. Thomson ought to be credited with tempering and naturalizing Milton, which is why he is an important intermediary figure for Collins, but his genius lies in his ability to dramatize the unrest and astonishing variety of nature. However, Thomson's reduction—all the more surprising because he is twenty years Collins' senior—is of minor interest compared to the elegy's repetition in a lesser tone of everything in "Lycidas" that threatens to raise it from pastoral to prophetic. Collins' subversion of Milton is conducted on many levels. There is a major formal change, as Milton's rugged lofty rhyme is replaced by Collins' even-flowing quatrains, and while there is some intricate alliterative patterning in "Lycidas" there is nothing quite like the delicate w-s-w-s-w weave of the elegy's second line. Milton's cast of characters is domesticated and sharply diminished: his assorted mythological beings are transformed into countryfolk and such personifications as Remembrance, Ease, and Health, genii of polite society. A more telling difference is in the responses of both poets to their loss. Collins remains uniformly subdued—not, as H. W. Garrod claims, that he is unfeeling,6 but the edge of his grief is blunted, finding expression as a diffuse melancholy. To turn to "Lycidas," with its intense primitive vigor, is to recognize the mind's furious resistance to any accommodation with experiential loss. Milton's initial gesture is one of premature harvesting, a trespass against Nature's seasonal order prompted by Nature's apparent trespass against humanity, its indifference or hostility to human desire. By contrast, Collins begins with an image of the Seasons spontaneously offering their "best sweets" to deck Thomson's grave. He here recalls the floral interlude in "Lycidas" where the vales are called upon to cast up their riches "to strew the Laureate Hearse where Lycid lies" (1. 151). Milton immediately dismisses this vision as "false surmise," proceeding to imagine the ultimate chaos: a "monstrous world" that has no meaning and is perhaps not even concerned with meaning. In Collins, however, there is no questioning of either Nature or the givens of pastoral artifice. That this refusal to follow Milton by crossing the threshold leading

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beyond pastoral consciousness is deliberate can be demonstrated by juxtaposing two passages. The relevant section in "Lycidas" is St. Peter's attack on the unworthy shepherds. Nowhere else does Milton strain the pastoral mode to such an extent, and after Peter's apocalyptic rage is spent there is a significant reversal, as water is frightened by a man. As Milton had earlier called Nature to the bar, so now through Peter's imprecation against the "blind mouths" who spread contagion throughout the world he pronounces a judgment on a society unmindful of its prophets. The crisis rhetoric of Peter's address culminates in a grim forecast of divine vengeance: "that two-handed engine at the door / Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more" (11. 130—131). The most discordant moment in the "Thomson Elegy" is also an imprecation: Yet lives there one, whose heedless eye Shall scorn thy pale shrine glimmering near? With him, sweet bard, may Fancy die, And Joy desert the blooming year. (25-28) The phrase "heedless eye," a transposition of Milton's "blind mouths," confirms a direct link between the two passages. Yet how muted is Collins by comparison! His elegy remains aloof from the tension in "Lycidas" between low and high styles, this world and the next. In Collins the curse is uttered by the poet himself in his role of pastoral bard, and it is directed against those who, in turning away from Nature, have also relinquished the pleasures a poetry like Thomson's is able to afford. St. Peter's enemies of God are converted into enemies of poetry, and instead of the pains of Hell Collins would visit upon them an extinction of natural joy. Following his heavenly vision Milton nominates Lycidas "the Genius of the shore." His metamorphosis into angelic guardian will prove a large recompense to future poets, especially the poets of Britain which, as an island, is all shore. There is a parallel in the fourth stanza of Collins' elegy: Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore When Thames in summer wreaths is dressed, And oft suspend the dashing oar To bid his gentle spirit rest! (13-16) As the last line suggests, Thomson is the true haunter of the shore. Henceforth he will be the genius of the Thames, reminding British poets

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to retain their intimacy with the "genial meads" he celebrated in his works. In keeping with the general drift of the elegy's narrative line and with its softening of "Lycidas," Collins transports the genius inland, closer to the heart of rural nature. Thomson, consigned to his sylvan grave, is as much genius of the wood as genius of the shore. The Aeolian harp of The Castle of Indolence becomes the vocal reeds surrounding Thomson's gravesite—pastoral and elegiac here converging—and his music is now a part of Nature's larger music. If Thomson becomes, in death, a spirit of place, he is a spirit of time as well: But thou, lorn stream, whose sullen tide No sedge-crowned Sisters now attend, Now waft me from the green hill's side, Whose cold turf hides the buried friend. And see, the fairy valleys fade, Dun Night has veiled the solemn view! Yet once again, dear parted shade, Meek Nature's child, again adieu! (29-36) As in the "Ode to Evening," Collins hastens away with the coming on of night, his relation to nature in the elegy mediated by Thomson's spirit, which is commensurate with twilight. "Dun Night" is clearly an inauspicious time: not only does it make the turf of the grave "cold," but there is also a possibility (if the "now" of line 30 means "now, at nightfall") that it voids nature of spirit ("the fairy valleys fade"), at least the kind of gentle spirits Collins is willing to encounter. It is therefore understandable that Collins now calls upon the Thames to "waft" him from the gravesite, a request best read alongside the magnificent peripety of "Lycidas": "Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth: /And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth" (11. 163-164). A radical difference is that Collins (I find "hapless youth" an apt description) has nowhere to be wafted other than the place he started from. His poem circles round, ending where it began: Long, long, thy stone and pointed clay Shall melt the musing Briton's eyes: Ό ! vales and wild woods', shall he say, 'In yonder grave your Druid lies!' Milton, on the other hand, passes from "melt with ruth" to revelation and "weep no more," drying his own melodious tear or else replenished

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by the honeyed (mel) sweetness of its mead. The self-image he leaves us with is of a man whose strength is fully repaired, outward-bound for "fresh woods and pastures new"—and for the "perilous flood." In shying away from the latter, indeed from any direct confrontation, Collins loses a great deal, but he also gains a measure of independence—or, to be more exact, distance—from Milton. Ironically, the elegy Milton claims to wish for himself in "Lycidas" is utterly foreign to the spirit of his own poem; yet it is just the kind of memorial Collins offers in the "Thomson Elegy": So may some gentle Muse With lucky words favor my destín'd Urn, And as he passes turn, And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud. (19-22)

The " O d e to Evening" Collins' triumph as the poet of Evening is the "Ode to Evening," probably his finest poem. It is also the most profoundly Miltonic of his exercises in the Evening mode. Just how extensive is Collins' absorption in Milton awaits clarification; it is enough at present to observe the most obvious features of indebtedness. First, the unrhymed stanza Collins employs is taken from Milton's translation of Horace's "Ad Pyrrham." More important, because it enables Collins to shape his poem in the absence of rhyme, is the ode's heavily Miltonic diction, which is for the most part a tissue of direct reminiscences and linguistic maneuvers learned from the minor poems and the lyrical interludes of Paradise Lost.7 These verbal affinities, moreover, point to a fundamental likeness between the ambience of the worlds both writers construct. Collins' region of the Evening ear stems from that spirit-haunted world of Miltonic lyricism in which all is distanced by reflection, by a resonant and teasingly indeterminate language that constantly intervenes between reader and setting. The ode's massive indebtedness to Milton does not, for once, impoverish Collins. If in the "Thomson Elegy" he accepts a secondary, diminished status because of his refusal to sustain the severity of "Lycidas," the "Ode to Evening" does not appear to be shaped from without, converting the alien Miltonic presence to its own substance. 8 A likely explanation is that Collins has captured what is most free-ranging in Milton: the meander, fluidity, and expansiveness of the octosyllabics

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and the similes of Paradise Lost. So long as he adheres to this spirit of redemptive gentleness Collins experiences a true dialectical relation to Milton, at once accepting and rejecting the father, appeasing and separating the dead. Although Milton is continually called upon, presumably to confer a certain measure of authority and authenticity, the voice one hears in the ode, at least in its masterful initial forty lines, is not an actual but a potential Miltonic voice released through the mediumship of his descendant. 9 What saves Collins is that the difference between actual and potential is great enough to preserve his integrity: for example, Milton would be temperamentally unsuited to undertake the prolonged empathic labor in the ode which yields a world of ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. Writing within Milton's shadow, Collins here realizes his unique gift more fully than in any other poem, claiming an important element in Milton as his own in order that he may explore and define the temper of his own mind. The poem begins in typical odic fashion as Collins apostrophizes and petitions his goddess, the long first sentence concluding with an apparent epiphanic salute: If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear, Like thy own solemn springs, Thy springs and dying gales, O nymph reserved, while now the bright-haired sun Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts, With brede ethereal wove, O'erhang his wavy bed; Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, Or where the beetle winds His small but sullen horn, As oft he rises midst the twilight path Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum: Now teach me, maid composed, To breathe some softened strain, Whose numbers stealing through thy darkening vale May not unseemly with its stillness suit, As musing slow, I hail Thy genial loved return! However, despite appearances—the exclamatory hailing of a divine presence at the climax of a twenty-line sentence—Hartman rightly asserts that the one feature of the Sublime ode "conspicuously absent is the

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epiphany proper." 10 The passage is, in fact, quasi-epiphanic. The traditional "hail" of line 19 does not betoken a sudden manifestation of the goddess; Collins hails her while "musing slow," which is precisely what he has been doing from the outset, and so his greeting is a sustained rhetorical gesture coinciding with the gradual insinuation of twilight. A further indication of this shying away from epiphany is that instead of hailing the goddess by name, as Milton does in "Il Penseroso," Collins hails her "genial loved return." Such indirection prevents Evening from emerging as a discrete figure; rather, she is imagined as a being—more a felt presence than a divine apparition—who merges imperceptibly with the landscape over which she presides. The Progress theme undergoes a similar modification. With the sun at rest, the continuance of progress is entrusted to Evening. Yet although her chariot is prepared by her attendants in the second movement of the ode, no pageant ensues; there is only the faintest suggestion of the traditional procession, as Evening is asked to lead the poet in his country ramblings. The ode's verbal movement has often been described as processional, but its ceremonious pace is hardly progressive at all, respecting instead the unhurried, desultory rhythms of the natural process it celebrates. The primary impression is one of gradualism, of gradual expansions and blendings, as in lines 3—4, or the lines "The fragrant Hours, and elves / Who slept in flowers the day" (11. 23-24), where "flowers" and "day" emerge elegantly from "fragrant Hours." Such reiterative patterning enforces a distinct sense of continuity, but the periodic flow of the verse remains unpropulsive due to Collins' various delaying devices. The most prominent of these is the use of loosely connected subordinate clauses in the first sentence to retard, drastically, the poet's simple appeal to his goddess: if any song of mine can soothe you, now teach it to me. Yet this in and of itself is not sufficient to explain the effect Collins achieves, for Milton's implementation of virtually the same technique at the opening of Paradise Lost actually enhances the climactic force of his address. Collins removes any possibility of gathering momentum chiefly through the surging-and-ebbing rhythms of the Pyrrha stanza but also through the interweaving of assonantal and consonantal patterns, the most pronounced involving the alternation between sibilants and the w-b pairing throughout the first sentence. The preponderance of open and back vowels, moreover, so diminishes the natural forward thrust of the verse that an intensified slow-motion effect, verging upon stasis, results. In the first line, for instance, there is an invitation to pause (note the positioning of "stop" before the initial caesura) and linger over this long-drawn-out protraction of the voice. Arresting tactics of this kind are not calculated to leave the reader in breathless expectancy but to evoke a

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sense of continuous, steady breathing. We are kept suspended between verticality and horizontal motion, attention centering upon the momentto-moment extension of Collins' "softened strain," as both reader and writer become absorbed by the tentatively advancing movement of twilight and the twilight consciousness. Both in its pacing and in its sustained evocation of a continuous present the ode resembles "Il Penseroso." Tracing the peripatetic movements of his Melancholy Man in the middle section of the poem, Milton presents him in a series of exemplary situations and attitudes. Despite the poem's overall progressive design, the structure of the narrative is not genuinely progressive; each frame of the series is a discrete unit, and the movement from frame to frame is highly contingent. Independence from logical sequence enables Milton to avert a spasmodic, halting gait and establish an exceptionally fluid rhythm. The continuum is maintained by a string of casual connectives: "and," "or," "oft," "sometime." The narrator might go here or there, do this or that, do it now or at some other time. What is important is the multiplicity of options available to him and the pleasure each, in its turn, is able to afford. True to the spirit of Milton's poem, Collins aims for a widening and intensification of consciousness. As in "Il Penseroso," there is no inevitable sequential development. In enumerating the properties of Evening, Collins shifts perspective freely, smoothing over potential discontinuities with the connectives "or," "as," "for," "while," "now," "when," and "then," which tend to obscure causal, modal, and temporal relations. The indeterminacy of the verse is emphasized by the prevailing grammatical mood—which, as in "Il Penseroso," is more or less subjunctive, perhaps optative—and by Collins' peculiarly errant syntax. At line 21, for example, he begins "For when," but it is only after a tenuously related passage on Evening's attendants and a period break that the construction is resolved by "Then lead" at line 29. Collins also loses sight of grammatical structure in the first sentence, where the clause beginning "Now air is hushed" (1. 9) is an anacoluthon that results from the poet being distracted by an arresting chorus of sounds. This wandering language, so often a disturbing feature in Collins, is here admirably suited to the mood of abstracted wonder-wandering he has picked up from "Il Penseroso." Collins' avoidance of obtrusive end-rhymes makes his poem even more beautifully uncertain than Milton's, more resistant to closure. That terminal point he resists may be viewed as the point at which the deferral of time is arrested and pensive reflection becomes self-conscious. Arnold disapprovingly compares the ode to "a river which loses itself in the sand." 11 Yet Collins wishes to be lost, to be led by the hypnotic, weaving rhythms of his style rather than to strive for architectonic rigor.

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Like Milton in "Il Penseroso," he needs to purge that species of brooding, self-centered melancholy which prompts the poet's ramblings. Regarded in this light, the programmatic intent of his excursive poetics is to keep the mind continually in motion, to keep its options open, so as to preclude fixation upon the self. Significantly, no doctrinal issues intrude, as in the majority of the 1746 Odes, and instead of alternating between description and reflection, like Gray in the "Elegy," he consummates their union. He remains remarkably unassertive, not eager for a punctual revelation; he is content to announce a presence whose meaning does not need to be interpreted. In "Il Penseroso" there is a superb rendition of the dreamy, wandering spirit I have been describing: And missing thee, I walk unseen On the dry smooth-shaven Green, To behold the wand'ring Moon, Riding near her highest noon, Like one that had been led astray Through the Heav'n's wide pathless way; And oft, as if her head she bow'd, Stooping through a fleecy cloud. Oft on a Plat of rising ground, I hear the far-off Curfew sound, Over some wide-water'd shore, Swinging slow with sullen roar. (65-76) In addition to motion and stillness, moon and wandering poet converge in these lines, the two subtly meeting through the juxtaposition of the moon stooping and the poet listening on rising ground. There is a comparable passage in the ode, the one dealing with the pilgrim and beetle: Now air is hushed save . . . . . . where the beetle winds His small but sullen horn, As oft he rises midst the twilight path Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum. Borne along "in heedless hum" as he "winds / His small but sullen horn," Collins' beetle seems to have been trained at a Miltonic music school; not only is he a descendant of the grayfly in "Lycidas" but his drowsy song echoes the cadences of Milton's far-off curfew "Swinging slow with sullen roar." As Merle Brown remarks in her excellent reading of the passage, the phrase "borne in heedless hum" is equally applicable to the

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pilgrim. 12 Indeed, the pilgrim could be borne along in the heedless hum of the beetle, or be humming to himself as he is borne along in reverie, or now be making a country pilgrimage away from the heedless hum of the town in which he was "born" (the original spelling). The ambiguity is telling because both beetle and pilgrim are subsumed by the larger rhythm of the twilight spirit. Both are heedless: careless or abstracted. The beetle is an active creature, yet its monotonous drone implies aimlessness, and the fact that it rises "oft" indicates random movement. And the pilgrim, though a traveler along the twilight path, is a man absorbed by solitary musing, a leisurely quester unmindful (heedless) of a goal. One wonders, however, about the beetle's rising "against" the pilgrim: will he be awakened from his reverie? The issue is unexplored, but there is an indication that Collins is bestirred, since at this point he finally introduces the main clause of his sentence with "Now teach me," the only imperative to be found in his circuitous appeal to Evening. The mood of unanxious reverie is nevertheless quickly reinstated, as the poet-quester resumes his petition in which asking and having are perfectly synchronized. Collins' petition is self-fulfilling because he has accommodated his style to Evening's gradual advent. While Evening's shadows swell through the landscape the numbers of the poet's song fill up the same space, stealing through her darkening vale. Landscape and soundscape become indistinguishable: objects are distanced, the despotic eye is quieted, and aural receptivity is heightened. At the same time language becomes, as it were, "weak-eyed," its iconicity subordinated to more elusive tonal effects. There is an extroversion of language as it seeks, through onomatopoeia and suggestive nuance, to be the proper harmonic echo of the twilight spirit; but since its subject is so tenuous it is continually deflected, casting a translucent word-screen between reader and phenomenon. Milton engages in similar verbal mimicry in those lines in "Il Penseroso" where the speaker retreats from "Day's garish eye" to the semidarkness of a woodland stream: There in close covert by some Brook, Where no profaner eye may look, Hide me from Day's garish eye, While the Bee with Honied thigh, That at her flow'ry work doth sing, And the Waters murmuring With such consort as they keep, Entice the dewy-feather'd Sleep; And let some strange mysterious dream

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Wave at his Wings in Airy stream, Of lively portraiture display'd, Softly on my eyelids laid. (139-150) A wide range of musical and synesthetic effects are drawn upon in the passage to trace the metamorphosis of profane sight into a vision softened through the treble mediation of shadow, sleep, and dream. Here, as Thomas Warton says, the language "would insensibly lull us asleep, did not the imagery keep us awake." 13 The genius of this style resides in its power to entice us to hunt out direct denotative meanings (does "they" in line 145 refer to waters or the consorted murmur of waters and bees; is the dream, like sleep, a birdlike creature, or is it the "Airy stream"; is the waving movement to be associated with the fluttering of the eyelids during dream-filled sleep or the motions of a watery stream?) even as it compels us to surrender to a general impression—a deep, imageless feeling—conveyed by a gestural meaning immanent in the discourse. 14 Turning to Collins' ode, one may adduce several instances of such dreamy confusion, but there is one passage which, although not so rich or sensuous as Milton's, is comparably suggestive: Then lead, calm vot'ress, where some sheety lake Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallowed pile, Or upland fallows grey, Reflect its last cool gleam. (29-32) This is the revised version of a stanza originally appearing in the 1746 edition as: Then let me rove some wild and heathy Scene, Or find some Ruin 'midst its dreary Dells, Whose Walls more awful nod By thy religious Gleams. Martin Price's commentary on the alteration is instructive: "The light is no longer Evening's; it is mediated through reflection. . . . Evening is absorbed into the placid lake, and the lake in turn casts its reflected light over heath, ruin, and fallows; the diffused light is part of the softer, more gently melancholy scene." 15 The success of Collins' revision can be traced to the introduction of a mediator of Evening's light, the lake—which can be viewed as an emblem of another mediator of Evening, the reflective poet. The passage, however, is more indeterminate than Price indicates. For instance, he does not note the puzzling use of "reflect," a

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grammatical lapse that is a blemish even if it is an intriguing one. There is some question as to whether the lake alone or the complex of lake, heath, pile, and fallows reflects "its last cool gleam." And what is the referent of "its": Evening, the lake, the "shadowy car" of line 28, the evening star? As in the "Il Penseroso" passage, meaning is inseparable from the style which is its vehicle; it is delineated via a conspiracy of image, sound, rhythm, and feeling ("cool gleam" is a fine synesthetic touch), which strongly perplexes the interpretative faculties it genially entertains. The Evening style of différance, in the combined sense of temporal detour and spatial interval, 16 is intrinsically related to the natural phenomenon it represents. While Evening reigns Collins inhabits a "married land" in which both perception and the material of common perception are transfigured. With the ebbing out of light and consequent softening of the eye, cooperation of the senses is established. Although Evening's darkening vale, or veiling, is a token of the estrangement of things, it is the only element in which Collins can approach the heart of things. Enveloping the entire landscape in the same ambience, twilight serves as a conductive medium that permits interaction and interfusion of ordinarily disparate entities: pilgrim and beetle; light, pool, heath, ruin, and fallows. This medium has a counterpart in Collins' delicately woven verse which draws together, through assonance and consonance, such extremes as weak-eyed bat and winding beetle, or sun and ocean: . . . while now the bright-haired sun Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts, With brede ethereal wove, O'erhang his wavy bed. (5-8) By opting for suspension rather than climactic effect, he minimizes these contrasts and suggests their equilibrium. 17 In lines 3—4, for example, there is a marked contrast between the somber or heavy and lively or light, but owing to redundancy and retardation they converge unobtrusively in the adjective-noun pairings "solemn springs" and "dying gales." The Evening style depicts a various world of contrary qualities and forces which are revealed to be not so much antitheses as alternate modulations of the same rhythmic counterpoint of surging and ebbing, motion and stasis, energy and repose. The ode's harmonization or even-ing out of extremes is as much dependent on Evening herself as the medium of twilight she embodies. She is a personification ideally suited to preside over this most successful of Collins' hymns of reconciliation: not only is she the regent of a medial

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time of day, but she is an intermediate being ontologically—at once natural, human, and divine. That she is a divinity belonging to a privileged mythic order of existence is variously evidenced: by her train, which is comprised of Hours, elves, nymphs, and "Pensive Pleasures sweet"; by her involvement in the seasonal cycle portrayed in lines 4 1 - 4 8 ; and by the cultic distance separating her from her supplicant in the opening petition. She is, however, an unusual sort of divine personage. As has often been observed, the presence Collins conjures up is less a spirit in the landscape than a spirit of the landscape. 18 There is no fixed beholding of Evening. Indeed, our only glimpse of her in the first forty lines is the reference to her "dewy fingers" drawing "the gradual dusky veil." This consistent evasion of blunt determinateness represents a refinement of Milton's technique in " Il Penseroso," where Melancholy appears, albeit briefly, as a picturable presence (11. 33—40) before receding into the background. 19 Collins follows Milton in adopting a predominately adjectival rather than nominal approach to his subject; as in "Il Penseroso," the goddess is evoked through an enumeration of her attributes (Evening is said to be chaste, modest, reserved, and so forth), attendants, and favorite haunts. The difference resides in the fact that Collins' goddess is the incarnation of a natural process in addition to a state of mind. Nowhere in Milton's poem is there an interpenetration of personification and natural element such as one discovers in the ode. This is most evident in the seasonal section: While Spring shall pour his showers, as oft he wont, And bathe thy breathing tresses, meekest Eve! While Summer loves to sport Beneath thy lingering light; While sallow Autumn fills thy lap with leaves, Or Winter, yelling through the troublous air, Affrights thy shrinking train, And rudely rends thy robes. (41-48) Here, as Collins has begun to generalize and thus lose, to a certain extent, his intimacy with Evening, she is no longer presented as a diffusive force animating her sphere of influence but emerges as a giant form. Yet, despite its relative directness, the passage is consonant with the ode's prevailing strategy of balancing numinous and perceivable, transcendent and immanent. Evening remains an elusive nature-spirit, blending into the landscape even more completely than Autumn in the second stanza of

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Keats's ode: her "breathing tresses" are either trees or grain, her lap is the lap of earth, and her robes are the shades of twilight. We are suspended in the precarious visionary dimension of Milton's belated peasant, unable to tell whether we see or dream we see what we think we see. Still to be considered is another unifying factor, the perceiving and recording agent. Where does the poet stand in relation to the world of the poem? Like Evening, as Brown argues, he is to be located both inside and outside the scene: "He must be in it when he hails her 'genial lov'd return', and he may be there too as the 'Pilgrim born in heedless Hum'. But he is absent during the first thirteen lines and during the eight which follow his greeting of Eve . . . He then tells Eve to lead him to a sheety lake, but we do not see him follow." His most direct entry into the scene occurs in the lines: But when chill blustering winds or driving rain Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut That from the mountain's side Views wilds and swelling floods, And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires, And hears their simple bell, and marks o'er all Thy dewy fingers draw The gradual dusky veil, (33-40) where, as Brown goes on to observe, "we see not him, but merely his view of the valley below." 20 What is truly startling here is that it is the hut which views, hears, and marks—a radical elision of the perceiving subject, which is the most revealing instance of the ode's practice of eroding the outlines of discrete, localized entities. The above passage is comparable in effect to the tower section of "Il Penseroso," where the poet is discovered looking inward upon an imagined version of himself ("Let my Lamp . . . be seen in some high lonely Tow'r"), who is at the same time gazing outward upon an imagined setting. In both poems there is a volatilization of the isolate ego, the rigid authorial mask of the persona, until a condition of virtual invisibility is attained. In both we follow the progress of an invisible poet, accompanied by an invisible goddess, as he wanders through an anonymous landscape which, as Hartman suggests in another context, is not so much one specific place as a generalized English place. 21 Collins' purgation of the selfhood is founded upon his realization of a larger process in which the individual participates. This, in turn, is dependent on the dual mediation of twilight and its spiritual incarnation,

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the goddess Evening. While twilight functions as a sustaining perceptual ground that fosters the coalescence of subject and object, Evening's role is to solidify that ground by rendering the scene imagination's landscape, "spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations." 22 Evening spiritualizes nature, and in so doing naturalizes the imagination. One reason she can perform this mediatory service is that, as in the "Ode to Fear," persona and personification are attuned to the same rhythm: all the epithets applied to Evening are implicitly transferable to the poet: she steals over the landscape gradually while he muses slowly; she is "composed" and he is a composer. However, again as in the "Ode to Fear," it is a mistake to identify I and Thou. To collapse the distance separating them is to violate the mystery of goddess and poet alike, to ignore the unappeasable longing for identification which keeps the poet questing. As a being from the "other world," Evening satisfies Collins' love of romance. She is an oracular figure who leads deep within so that the poet can make contact with his own greater-than-rational powers, and she is a muse leading from the present into the rich imaginative past of pastoral (past oral) poetry. That imaginative past, it should be clear by now, is principally Miltonic. Evening is most obviously a reincarnation of the goddess of "Il Penseroso." Though Collins' diffidence is to be contrasted with Milton's self-confidence, the speaker's relationship to the goddess in both poems is analogous. She is a spirit to be wooed and won, sparking an outwardgoing impulse of love that carries over into his excursion through a landscape which, owing to her guardianship, is perceived as an animate, answerable world. Moreover, the mood or modality of consciousness she represents is essentially the same in both. The goddess is an embodiment of what I have termed the "twilight consciousness": a mood of pensive reverie poising midway between receptivity and active creation, perception and vision. Where she presides the extremes of "Day's garish eye" and "blackest midnight" are refined away; the poet, in a state of semiwakefulness, inhabits an environment of semidarkness that at once shields him from direct contact with the world and yet, investing it with the charm of aesthetic distance, leads him closer to it. In Collins the goddess is, by definition, compounded of darkness and light. She draws about the landscape a "dusky veil," which is probably to be identified with her robes of state. Milton's Melancholy is "O'erlaid with black, staid Wisdom's hue" (1. 16), a veil which hides her excessive brightness. In both poems darkness and light combine to shed a "dim religious light," an appropriate medium for the sainted goddess: in Milton she is

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called "pensive Nun" (1. 31) and "sad Virgin" (1. 103), in Collins "chaste Eve" (1. 2) and "calm vot'ress" (1. 29). The asexuality of the goddess reminds us that the twilight consciousness is a private consciousness, a heightened condition of solitude that occasions the poet's deepened musings. Another Miltonic virgin goddess that may have influenced Collins' conception of Evening is Sabrina, the protector of chastity in Comus. Both are addressed as nymphs. Like Evening, Sabrina is an ontologically amorphous being: originally human, she "underwent a quick immortal change" and was appointed goddess of the river Severn. A true genius loci, she is indistinguishable from the natural element she governs: By the rushy-fringed bank, Where grows the Willow and the Osier dank, My sliding Chariot stays, Thick set with Agate and the azurn sheen Of Turquoise blue and Em'rald green That in the channel strays, Whilst from off the waters fleet Thus I set my printless feet O'er the Cowslip's Velvet head, That bends not as I tread. (890-899) As Evening's "shadowy car" is evening itself, Sabrina's "sliding Chariot" is the stream she personifies, its gems the variegated colors of the water. The exquisitely evanescent Sabrina is likewise a spirit of twilight: "oft at Eve" she "Visits the herds along the twilight meadows, / Helping all urchin blasts, and ill-luck signs" (11. 843-845). "If she be right invok't" (1. 855), she will dispense her healing liquor in the service of the ensnared Lady, whose perfected Echo Sabrina is. Is it too extravagant to propose that Collins also requires supernatural intercession, invoking his goddess by her favorite name in order that she may rouse his dormant energies and renew his sorely needed contact with the natural world? Collins directs us to Evening's most revealing Miltonic analogue by naming his goddess "Eve." 23 While it is true that Collins' Eve is more sober than Milton's, Evening has much in common with Eve, the chaste, unfallen Eve who epitomizes Eden's delights and whose innocence protects her "as a veil" (IX. 1054). As Kurt Schlüter observes, Evening "bringt den Menschen das Paradies!" 24 For in that temporal pause when Evening rules the earth Collins recaptures the unitary vision of an unfallen world that Milton projects in the octosyllabics and the Edenic

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sections of Paradise Lost. The human counterpart of this married land is the sexual union of lover and beloved, the chaste "wedded Love" Milton celebrates in Book IV of Paradise Lost before leaving Adam and Eve to their spousal rites. The fact that Collins' "calm vot'ress" is a being outside the line of procreation does not refute an interpretation of him as a new Adam courting his Eve, or interior paramour, the granter of those imaginative pleasures "by him best receiv'd" (PL.IV.309). After all, there is in English poetry, especially pastoral poetry, frequently a close—perhaps perverse—alliance between innocence and eroticism. Comus, for example, is at one and the same time a defense of virginity and the most sensuous of Milton's poems. The "Ode to Evening" is a similar fusion of the chaste and erotic, in terms of style as well as sentiment. Its form partakes of that chaste Hellenic simplicity Collins was so fond of, yet its meandering language betrays the luxuriance of a romantic imagination. Hailing Evening's "genial loved return," he offers a prothalamic greeting to a goddess who yields to him as Eve does to Adam, "with coy submission, modest pride, / And sweet reluctant amorous delay" (IV.310— 311). This submerged sexual element, though surfacing completely only in the seasonal stanzas, comes very near the surface when Hesperus, termed a "warning lamp" (1. 22), beckons Evening's attendants to prepare her shadowy car. According to Hartman, Collins traces "a ritual. . . progress which draws (like a marriage procession) a 'gradual dusky veil' around the scene. The poem's probable source in conventional odes to an evening star, which guides lover to beloved in the dangerous dark, may also help to induce this prothalamic effect."25 The Miltonic source is the account in Paradise Lost of the nightingale bidding "haste the Ev'ning Star / On his Hill top, to light the bridal Lamp" (VI11.519-520) directly after Eve's creation. The only problem is that instead of leading to consummation the drawing of Evening's veil results in the separation of lover and beloved. At nightfall the bride departs. One thinks of the conclusion of the "Ode on the Poetical Character" in which the inspiring bowers of Milton's paradise are "curtained close . . . from every future view." Again the poet is a belated quester whose muse will not, cannot yield herself utterly to him. While Collins' precarious relation to his muse is not necessarily the consequence of her being already married to Milton, there can be little doubt that the shadow cast by Milton's presence imparts a sober coloring to his descendant's vision of a latter-day Eve. The ode is a good deal more somber and plangent than its primary source, "Il Penseroso," Collins' pondering considerably more ponderous than Milton's. Evening is a

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"pensive Eve" (the original version of "chaste Eve") who yields her votary a paradise that is not wholly paradisical, one which bears traces of the original Eden but which also retains the memory of its loss. At best Collins' Evening realm is a momentary paradise. Flanked by daylight and nighttime, Evening is essentially a transitional or transitory moment, the ultimate Collinsian threshold of experiential betweenness and bewilderment. 26 The insistence of "Now teach me" in the initial petition and the reference to the evening star as a warning lamp imply that despite his erotic slowing of time Collins is aware of how little time he has to spend with his goddess. Though her departure is signaled by the drawing of the veil in line 40, his severance from Evening begins to take effect earlier. At line 33 he begins to consider not a single evening but several kinds of evenings, now entering that curiously sentient hut in which he presumably remains until the conclusion. He is driven there by rough weather, the alteration in tone marked by the shift from "last cool gleam" to "chill blustering winds." There is, of course, no possibility of such elemental disturbance in Milton's Paradise, but with the Fall there is a drastic change in clime: At that tasted Fruit The Sun, as from Thyéstean Banquet, turn'd His course intended, else how had the World Inhabited, though sinless, more than now, Avoided pinching cold and scorching heat? These changes in the Heav'ns, though slow, produc'd Like changes on Sea and Land, sideral blast, Vapor, and Mist, and Exhalation hot, Corrupt and Pestilent. (X.687-695) Universal Discord initiates the pageant of the Seasons. The sequence in the ode is from storm to seasonal cycle, culminating in a terrific demonic epiphany: Or Winter, yelling through the troublous air, Affrights thy shrinking train And rudely rends thy robes. No wonder Evening needs to be "soothed." And no wonder that Collins cleaves to that sylvan shed dedicated to the perpetuation of Evening when the approaching night will not arrive as in Paradise, where brightness is succeeded by "grateful Twilight (for Night comes not there / In darker veil) and roseate Dews" (V.645-646). The pattern is typical: threatened by violence and discontinuity, Col-

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lins would secure himself from the variableness of day and night and of weathers, seeking the temperate climate of imaginative repose. The onset of winter and night is a disenchanting reminder that his benign fictional arrest of time cannot charm away the arrest of death, or the death that is self-consciousness. Collins is driven into his sylvan shed—shrine or urn or womb—by the emergent possibility of real solitude, the horror of a direct assault. This helps to explain his earlier delaying tactics, his avoidance of coming to a point. There is in Collins a persistent dread of what is to come: the setting of the virile sun, the northering of the poetical spirit, the veiling of the sources of inspiration. Within his retreat he would extend his Evening musings and so "forget all time" (PL.IV.639). He is uncomfortable in his situation as a boundary being even though the boundaries of his perfected art extend into eternity, not content with the permanence of an artifact which commemorates the temporary. He wants instead real continuity, a permanent indwelling of the spirit of Evening and her "Pensive Pleasures sweet." Yet his continuity with Evening, initially violated by nature, is subsequently violated by Collins himself, who in the final stanza betrays his own imagination: So long, sure-found beneath the sylvan shed, Shall Fancy, Friendship, Science, rose-lipped Health, Thy gentlest influence own, And hymn thy favourite name! Collins' intentions are clear enough: he wishes, as Hartman states, to wed "the archaic numen of nature poetry" to "the ideals of polite society." 27 For once, however, his genius for reconciliation fails him. His earlier vision of Evening, a splendid purgation of ideas of order, is displaced by the bluntly abstract discourse of an adjudicative persona. Miltonic solitude gives way to Horadan retirement, as Collins offers a portrait of a Thomsonian social Beulah of the "enlightened few" who ward off the terror of the elements with sweet reasonableness. Collins' anxiety to recapitulate Milton's experience in "Il Penseroso" may have caused him to overextend his poem. He seeks out the peaceful hermitage of his precursor's weary age in which vision will have become habitual. Most significant, however, is what he does not repeat in Milton's experience. There is no ordeal of solitude within his hut. His refusal to venture beyond pastoral innocence, the domain of Evening, dooms him to an abortive rite of passage which signals imagination's defeat. Thus, in the "Ode to Evening," as in the majority of his poems, Collins at once becomes and ceases to be a poet. He knows that paradise is lost. But he cannot sufficiently acknowledge the fact that it must be lost, that any

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spiritual ideal worth preserving must remain vulnerable. More vulnerable than the great Romantics, Collins cannot freely offer up his spirit to a transforming visionary blindness. Unwilling to remain unconsummated, he does not undertake their dubious explorations of the shadowy ground of human consciousness. He nevertheless heralds their labors of reparation. Enduring the burden of the past, Collins achieves some marvelous breakthroughs which lead him, and English poetry, into the equally exhausting burdens of the present.

Notes 1. Introduction 1. The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1902-1904), vol. 5, Lectures on the English Poets, pp. 115-116. 2. See Geoffrey H. Hartman, "Toward Literary History," in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), p. 370; and "History Writing as Answerable Style," in The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 110. 3. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), p. 4. 4. An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London, 1735), p. 28. 5. See Colley Cibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1753), 2:129. 6. See Anne Davidson Ferry, Milton and the Miltonic Dryden (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 2 1 - 1 2 1 . 7. "Milton," in Lives of the English Poets (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1952), 1:109. 8. Ibid., 1:77. 9. Ibid., 1:123. 10. I am indebted to one of Bloom's class lectures for clarifying my understanding of the Milton-Johnson relationship. 11. Lives of the English Poets, 1:133. 12. See Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), p. 91. 13. See William W. Kerrigan, The Prophetic Milton (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1974), especially chapters 2 and 3. 14. Milton's Poetry of Choice and Its Romantic Heirs (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1973), p. 222. 15. Lectures and Notes on Shakspere and Other English Poets, ed. T. Ashe (London: George Bell & Sons, 1890), p. 532. 16. See Hartman, "Christopher Smart's 'Magnificat': Toward a Theory of Representation," in Fate of Reading, p. 81. 17. "Appendix to Lyrical Ballads" (1802), in The Complete Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Andrew J. George (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1932), p. 799. 18. Cf., e.g., stanza 3 of the "Ode to Simplicity" and, in Milton, Paradise Regained.IV.247-249 (hereafter cited as PR); Comus, 11. 232-235; and "Sonnet 8," 11. 12-13. See Edward G. Ainsworth, Poor Collins: His Life, His Art, and His Influence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1937), p. 130. 19. All citations of Collins' works are from the edition of Roger Lonsdale, The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith (London: Longmans, 1969).

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20. See A. S. P. Woodhouse, "The Poetry of Collins Reconsidered," in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 122; Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 280; and Chester F. Chapín, Personification in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (New York: King's Crown Press, Columbia Univ., 1955), p. 70. For a subtler interpretation of literary pictorialism, see John B. Bender, Spenser and Literary Pictorialism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972). 21. On Milton's revolutionary attitude toward tradition, see Northrop Frye, The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton's Epics (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1965), pp. 9 0 - 9 2 ; Angus Fletcher, The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton's "Comus" (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 132 ff.; and Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., Angel of Apocalypse: Blake's Idea of Milton (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1975), pp. 151 ff. 22. Milton's Poetry of Choice, p. 298. 23. Angel of Apocalypse, p. 219. 24. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, 2nd ed. rev., trans. J. B. Baillie (London: Macmillan & Co., 1931), p. 93. 25. "The Birth of Tragedy" and "The Genealogy of Morals", trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1965), The Genealogy of Morals, p. 210. 26. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 96.

2. The "Ode on the Poetical Character" 1. Monthly Review 30 (January 1764): 24. 2. See Paul de Man, "Ludwig Binswanger and the Sublimation of the Self," in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 4 5 - 4 7 . 3. As quoted by William L. Phelps, The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1893), p. 35. 4. On Spenser's reputation in the period, see Earl R. Wasserman, Elizabethan Poetry in the Eighteenth Century, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, no. 34 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1947), pp. 92-152. 5. Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (published originally as De sacra poesi Hebraeorum, 1753), trans. G. Gregory (London, 1787) 1:275. 6. The texts of Milton's poems are taken throughout from John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957). Paradise Lost will be cited as PL. 7. "Collins' ' O d e on the Poetical Character,' " English Literary History 34 (March 1967): 103 ff. 8. Frank Allen Patterson, ed., The Student's Milton, rev. ed. (New York: F. S. Crofts & Co., 1946), pp. 549-550. Quotations from Milton's prose are from this edition. 9. Ibid., p. 549. 10. The Reason of Church Government Urged against Prelaty, in The Student's Milton, p. 525.

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11. The Student's Milton, p. 656. 12. Cf. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. John Shawcross (1907; reprint ed., London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), 1:109-110 and 202. 13. The Student's Milton, p. 499. 14. See Woodhouse, "The Poetry of Collins Reconsidered," p. 129; Wasserman, "Collins' ' O d e on the Poetical Character,' " p. 98; and Lonsdale, ed., The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, p. 432. 15. See Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1961), pp. 3-10; Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1947), pp. 169-170; Edmund Blunden, The Poems of William Collins (London: Frederick Etchells & Hugh MacDonald, 1929), p. 168; and P. L. Carver, A Life of a Poet: A Biographical Sketch of William Collins (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1967), p. 128. 16. The Student's Milton, p. 750. 17. "Auguries of Innocence," 11. 129-132. Cf. line 129 in Blake and PL.III.3; line 130 in Blake and PL.III. 14-26, 3 2 - 5 0 ; line 131 in Blake and PL.III.44; and line 132 in Blake and PL.III.51-55. 18. Yeats (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 6. 19. The Poetry of Vision: Five Eighteenth-Century Poets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), p. 72. 20. John Hollander's phrase in Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 24. 21. See The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 19 ff. 22. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in The Student's Milton, p. 761. 23. See The Christian Doctrine, chap. 11, in The Student's Milton, p. 999.

3. Rapture and Purgatory Blind 1. See J. H. Van den Berg's analysis of this phenomenon in The Changing Nature of Man: Introduction to a Historical Psychology, trans. H. F. Croes (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1975). 2. See René Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1941), pp. 47 ff. 3. The Best of Dryden, ed. Louis I. Bredvold (New York: Ronald Press Co., 1933), p. 451. 4. Significantly, even as Collins here writes about Shakespeare his more fundamental obsession with Milton shows through. Cf. these lines and Dryden's "Epigram on Milton." 5. P. L. Carver speculates that the two works were originally written in a piece and that the lines on the Restoration theater were excerpted in deference to Hanmer's conservative taste: A Life of a Poet: A Biographical Sketch of William Collins (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1967), p. 27. 6. This regressive pattern (from gold to silver to lead) appears in the "Hanmer Epistle," 11. 21-36. 7. Animadversions, in The Student's Milton, p. 492. 8. I allude to Mansus' tribute to the young Milton: non Anglus3 verum herculè Angelus ipse fores.

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9. On the impact of Milton's octosyllabics, see George Sherburn, "The Early Popularity of Milton's Minor Poems," Modern Philology 17 (August 1919): 259-278, (January 1920): 515-540; Raymond Dexter Havens, The Influence of Milton on English Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1922); Edward Dowden, Milton and the Eighteenth Century (1701-1750), Proceedings of the British Academy (London, 1907-1908); Henry A. Beers, A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1899); and William L. Phelps, The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1893). 10. Geoffrey H. Hartman, "False Themes and Gentle Minds," in Beyond Formalism, p. 286. 11. Brisman, Milton's Poetry of Choice and Its Romantic Heirs (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 23-24. For Fish, see "What It's Like to Read L'Allegro and Il Penseroso," Milton Studies 7 (1975): 7 7 - 9 9 . 12. See Hartman, "False Themes and Gentle Minds," pp. 287-289. 13. Line 10 of "Il Penseroso" cites Morpheus; the "dark Cimmerian desert" of "L'Allegro" (1. 10) recalls Ovid's account of Morpheus' cave in the land of the Cimmerians {Metamorphoses.XI.592-596). For Orpheus, see "L'Allegro," 11. 145-150, and "Il Penseroso," 11. 105-108. 14. On this unwieldy multiplication of Simplicity's concomitants, see Havens, "Simplicity, a Changing Concept," Journal of the History of Ideas 14 (January 1953): 3-32. 15. See Georges Poulet, Études sur le Temps Humain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1949), p. 27; Martin Price, "The Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers," Yale Review 57 (Winter 1968): 202 ff.; and Spacks, The Poetry of Vision, p. 77. 16. The Analysis of Beauty (London, 1753), p. 28. 17. "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility," in Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), p. 133. 18. The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 112. 19. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1964), p. 161. 20. The relation between Collins' odes and the love-elegy tradition is worthy of investigation. See the fragment "No Longer Ask Me, Gentle Friends," a loveelegy employing many of the topoi of the odes. 21. Fletcher himself points to this association: Allegory, p. 51. 22. Ibid., p. 59. 23. In Collins dispersion occurs on the linguistic level as well, manifested by his wandering syntax, the weakened connective power of his verbs, his frequent participial and appositional constructions. 24. Essay on the Study of Literature, in The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Esq., ed. Lord John Sheffield (London: B. Blake, 1837), p. 662. 25. The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1951), p. 185. 26. The phrasing is that of Priestly, quoted in P. W. K. Stone, The Art of Poetry: 1750-1820 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), p. 66. See Stone's chapter "The Role of Feeling in Composition," pp. 64-76. 27. See Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946), pp. 62 ff.

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4. In Dreams Begin Responsibilities 1. "On the Idea of Universal Poetry," in The Works of Richard Hurd (London, 1811), 1:8-9. 2. See Dr. Johnson on the allegory of Sin and Death in "Milton," Lives of the English Poets, 1:128-129. 3. An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 5th ed. (London, 1806), 2:32. 4. Λ Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 2nd ed. (London, 1759), p. 332. 5. Ibid., pp. 100-101. 6. Preface to The Poetical Works of William Collins (London, 1797), p. xx. 7. See Martin Price, "The Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers," Yale Review 57 (Winter 1968): 203; and Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (Menasha, Wis.: George Banta Publishing Co., 1935), p. 85. 8. Cf. Woodhouse, "The Poetry of Collins Reconsidered," pp. 122-123. 9. "Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci," in Beyond Formalism, p. 331. 10. The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 14. 11. "False Themes and Gentle Minds," pp. 288-289. 12. In addition to quarrying his rhymes and rhythms from the octosyllabics, Collins is indebted to Milton's invitational structure, his use of the brief literary progress, his account of the personification's train, and, most important, his conception of the persona-personification relation. 13. My interpretation here harmonizes with what Bloom terms the revisionary ratio of Daemonization or the Counter-Sublime. See The Anxiety of Influence, pp. 99-112. 14. Quoted by Ernst Cassirer in Language and Myth, p. 18. 15. The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 17. 16. See Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 14-15, on the need to render the indeterminate daemon concrete as a personal god; and C. S. Lewis, "Genius and Genius," in The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1936), pp. 361-363. 17. Cited in Kierkegaard's The Concept of Irony: With Constant Reference to Socrates, trans. Lee M. Chapel (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 191. 18. Ibid., pp. 190-191. 19. The Greeks and the Irrational, p. 82. 20. Ibid., p.153. 21. "Fear and Trembling" and "The Sickness unto Death", trans. Walter Lowrie (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1954), Fear and Trembling, p.· 124. 22. The Student's Milton, p. 741. 23. The Insistence of Horror: Aspects of the Supernatural in EighteenthCentury Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), p. 98. 24. "The Melodramatic Imagination: The Example of Balzac and James," in Romanticism: Vistas, Instances, Continuities, ed. David Thorburn and Geoffrey H. Hartman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1973), p. 209. 25. The invocation of Shakespeare is, of course, appropriate in view of the ode's association of Fear with the tragic terror. 26. An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 2:402—403.

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27. See Rachel Trickett, "The Augustan Pantheon: Mythology and Personification in Eighteenth Century Poetry," Essays and Studies 6 (1953): 71-86. 28. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 109. 29. Ibid., p. 106. 30. The History of English Poetry, from the Eleventh to the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1870), pp. 948-951. 31. Fearful Symmetry, p. 164. 32. The Poetical Works of Mr. William Collins (London, 1765), p. 114. 33. On the Progress theme, see John R. Crider, "Structure and Effect in Collins' Progress Poems," Studies in Philology 60 (January 1963): 5 7 - 7 2 ; Reginald Harvey Griffith, "The Progress Pieces of the Eighteenth Century," Texas Review 5 (July 1920): 218-233; and Geoffrey H. Hartman, "Blake and the Progress of Poesy," in Beyond Formalism, pp. 193-205. 34. See Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1949). 35. See Raymond Dexter Havens, "Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in Thomson," Studies in Philology 29 (January 1932): 4 1 - 5 2 ; and Lois Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1934). 36. Milton is an important ancestor here. See especially The Second Defense, in The Student's Milton, p. 1143; and cf. PL.IX.44-45 and The Reason of Church Government, in The Student's Milton, p. 525. See Zera S. Fink, "Milton and the Theory of Climatic Influence," Modern Language Quarterly 2 (March 1941): 6 7 - 8 0 ; and John M. Wallace, "Milton's Arcades" Journal of English and Germanic Philology 58 (October 1959): 627-636. For a full study of the age's enthusiasm for the genius of the North, see Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England: A Study in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952). 37. See Arthur Johnston, Enchanted Ground: A Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth-Century (London: Athlone Press, 1964). 38. See Woodhouse, "The Poetry of Collins Reconsidered," p. 136; John Middleton Murry, "The Poetry of William Collins," in Countries of the Mind (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1922), p. 91; and H. W. Garrod, The Poetry of Collins, Proceedings of the British Academy, no. 14 (London, 1928), p. 90. 39. The Student's Milton, pp. 748-749. 40. Ibid., pp. 747-748. 41. Ibid., p. 749. 42. Ibid., p. 748. 43. Here I play upon Blake's doctrine of contraries in the Marriage, which in turn recalls Milton in Areopagitica, in The Student's Milton, p. 738; and The Reason of Church Government, in The Student's Milton, p. 520. 44. See James Hogg's Collins-inspired "Superstition," where the northerly progress has continued, leaving Scotland behind; he concludes with a look to the fairer fields of Norway; see also Rexmond C. Cochrane, "Bishop Berkeley and the Progress of Arts and Learning: Notes on a Literary Convention," Huntington Library Quarterly 17 (May 1954): 229-249. 45. The Poetry of Vision, pp. 211-212. 46. The Insistence of Horror, p. 97. 47. The Works of Richard Hurd, 4:321-322.

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48. Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser, 2nd ed. (London, 1762), 1:16. 49. "False Themes and Gentle Minds," p. 285. 50. On the reticence of Samson Agonistes, see Anne Davidson Ferry, Milton and the Miltonic Dryden (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 127-177. 51. Cf., in this regard, lines 138 and 161.

5. A Poetry of the Evening Ear 1. The Background of Gray's Elegy: A Study in the Taste for Melancholy Poetry, 1700-1751 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1924), p. 176. 2. See Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (New York: Basic Books, 1964), pp. 2 2 8 - 2 3 1 . 3. The Changing Nature of Man, p. 234. 4. "Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry," in Beyond Formalism, p. 210. 5. There has been considerable discussion of the propriety of the term Druid as applied to Thomson: see especially Garrod, The Poetry of Collins, pp. 1 4 6 148; J. M. S. Tompkins, " 'In Yonder Grave a Druid Lies,' " Review of English Studies 11 (January 1946): 1-16; and E. M. W. Tillyard, "William Collins's ' O d e on the Death of Thomson,' " Review of English Literature 1 (July 1960): 3 2 - 3 3 . The likelihood is that in the poem's first line, "In yonder grave a Druid lies," Collins has in mind line 53 of "Lycidas," "Where your old Bards, the famous Druids, lie" (italics mine). In the ode Thomson is Nature's poet-priest, and in "Lycidas" the muses of the priestly Druids are nature-sprites. 6. The Poetry of Collins, pp. 109-110. 7. Ainsworth details most of the overt Miltonic echoes in his careful analysis: Poor Collins, pp. 144-148. 8. See W. K. Wimsatt, "Organic Form: Some Questions about a Metaphor," in Romanticism, p. 21. 9. In Bloomian terms, the Collins-Milton relationship partakes of the revisionary ratios of askesis and apophrades. 10. "Poem and Ideology: A Study of Keats's 'To Autumn,' " in Fate of Reading, p. 138. 11. "Emerson," in Discourses in America (New York: Macmillan Co., 1924), p. 157. 12. "On William Collins' 'Ode to Evening,' " Essays in Criticism 11 (April 1961): 148. 13. Milton, Poems upon Several Occasions, with Notes Critical and Explanatory, and Other Illustrations by Thomas Warton (London, 1785), p. 89. 14. My terms are derived from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "The Body as Expression, and Speech," in The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty, trans. Colin Smith, ed. Alden L. Fisher (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), pp. 185-213. 15. To the Palace of Wisdom: Studies in Order and Energy from Dryden to Blake (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1964) p. 375. 16. See Jacques Derrida, "Differance," in Speech and Phenomena and Other

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Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 129-160. 17. See Brown, "On William Collins' ' O d e to Evening,' " pp. 147-149. 18. See especially Alan Dugald McKillop, "Collins's ' O d e to Evening'— Background and Structure," Tennessee Studies in Literature 5 (January 1960): 76-78. 19. There is, however, no direct presentation of the goddess in "L'Allegro." 20. "On William Collins' ' O d e to Evening,' " p. 144. 21. "Wordsworth, Inscriptions, and Romantic Nature Poetry," p. 226. 22. This is Coleridge commenting on the distinguishing feature of the Wordsworthian imagination in "Guilt and Sorrow," in Biographia Literaria, 1:59. 23. On the relationship between Evening and Pyrrha, see Martin Kallich, " 'Plain in thy Neatness': Horace's Pyrrha and Collins' Evening," English Language Notes 3 (June 1966): 2 6 5 - 2 7 1 ; and Henry Pettit, "Collins's ' O d e to Evening' and the Critics," Studies in English Literature 4 (Summer 1964): 3 6 7 368. 24. Die Englische Ode: Studien zu ihren Entwicklung unter dem Einfluss der Antiken Hymne (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1964), p. 140. 25. "Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci," in Beyond Formalism, p. 322. 26. See Angus Fletcher, " 'Positive Negation': Threshold, Sequence, and Personification in Coleridge," in New Perspectives on Coleridge and Wordsworth: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 133-164. 27. "Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci," p. 323.

Index Addison, Joseph, 98 Akenside, Mark, 28, 80; "To the Muse," 7 Ambivalence, 16-17, 65-66, 7 2 - 7 5 , 77 Anxiety, 16, 26, 32, 37, 68, 71, 103, 123; creative, 9, 36, 74, 77; Fear as projection of, 66 Archaism, 5, 5 5 - 5 6 , 6 7 - 6 8 , 79, 97, 99 Arnold, Matthew, 105, 112 Augustans, 72, 81, 8 4 - 8 5 , 90; Collins' rejection of, 3 0 - 3 1 , 40, 41, 43, 87; and Milton, 6-7; resistance to power among, 7, 78-80 Aural, 58, 114; and visionary blindness, 2 8 - 2 9 , 73. See also Collins, antipictorial bias of Autobiography, 18-19, 31, 43 Bachelard, Gaston, 55 Barbauld, Laetitia, 65 Bate, Walter Jackson, 4, 5 Belatedness, 4 - 6 , 9 - 1 1 , 32, 33, 38—39 41 121 Belief, 12, 75-77, 7 8 - 7 9 , 95, 98 Bible: Ezekiel, 27; Isaiah, 36 Blackwell, Thomas, 4 - 5 , 38, 62, 80, 95 Blake, William, 12, 13, 2 4 - 2 5 , 33, 53, 56, 80, 93, 130 n. Works: "Auguries of Innocence," 2 4 - 2 5 , 127n; "Mad Song," 12; Milton, 14; "The Tyger," 14 Blending, 111, 113-114, 116, 1 1 7 119 Bloom, Harold, 5-6, 9, 14, 27, 32, 131 η Brisman, Leslie, 8, 13, 44 Brooks, Peter, 77 Brown, John, 58 Brown, Merle, 113, 118 Burke, Edmund, 64-65 Burton, Robert, 45, 103 Carver, P. L., 127 η

Chastity, 19, 32, 33, 74, 120-121 Chaucer, Geoffrey, The House of Fame, 4 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 9, 61, 127 η Collins, William: antipictorial bias of, 11, 6 4 - 6 5 , 66, 104, 109, 114, 116, 117; and evasion of Milton, 2 9 - 3 0 ; and fear of imaginative possibility, 12, 30, 3 5 - 3 6 , 49, 72, 73, 7 6 - 7 8 , 123; negative influence of Milton on, 10, 16, 26, 27, 32, 35-36, 48, 50, 75, 90; positive influence of Milton on, 1 0 - 1 1 , 102, 109-110; and pursuit of immediacy, 5 1 - 5 4 ; and quest for myth, 7 8 - 9 3 ; and quest for poetic identity, 3 - 4 , 11-12, 43, 59, 6 1 ; and the Romantics, 12-13, 100, 101, 124; and softening of Milton, 102, 105-109; splitmindedness of, 3, 37, 46, 4 8 - 4 9 , 5 0 - 5 1 , 5 7 - 5 9 , 6 2 - 6 3 , 65-66, 7 4 - 7 7 , 98; temporal consciousness of, 4 1 - 4 2 ; and undoing of Miltonic sublimation, 67-68. Works: "An Epistle: Addressed to Sir Thomas Hanmer," 3 9 - 4 1 , 52, 127 n; "How Sleep the Brave," 104, 105; "Lines on Restoration Drama," 4 0 - 4 1 , 127 n; "The Manners. An Ode," 4 5 - 4 7 , 48, 52, 68, 81; "No Longer Ask Me, Gentle Friends," 128 n; "Ode Occasioned by the Death of Mr Thomson," 105-109, 131 n; "Ode on the Poetical Character," 3, 12, 15-36, 37, 88, 89, 101, 121; "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland," 3, 10, 53, 76, 9 3 - 1 0 1 , 131 n; "Ode, to a Lady on the Death of Colonel Ross," 53, 104; "Ode to Evening," 3, 10, 11, 13, 29, 30, 53, 103, 105, 108, 109-124; "Ode to Fear," 3, 12, 51, 53, 63-77, 78, 79, 81, 96, 97, 119; "Ode to Liberty," 15, 25, 4 1 , 52,

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8 6 - 9 3 ; " O d e to Mercy," 53; " O d e to Pity," 1 0 - 1 1 , 4 9 - 5 0 , 57; "Ode to Simplicity," 4 7 - 4 9 , 58, 81, 125 n; "The Passions. An Ode for Music," 52, 5 8 - 6 1 ; Persian Eclogues, 17, 18, 53, 72, 8 1 - 8 3 , 94; "A Song from Shakespeare's Cymbeline," 104, 105; "To Simplicity," 47, 48, 52; "Young Damon of the Vale is Dead," 105 Continuity, 15, 3 4 - 3 5 , 41, 4 4 - 4 5 , 5 4 - 5 5 , 5 8 - 5 9 , 7 0 - 7 1 , 86, 9 0 - 9 1 , 92, 111-112, 122-123; between present and literary past, 5, 3 8 - 3 9 , 41, 91. See also Discontinuity Cowley, Abraham, 8 Cowper, William, 102; "The Contrite Heart," 51-52 Daemonic, 57, 77, 102-103; bivalence of, 7 2 - 7 3 , 75; as existential basis of personification, 67-70; influence as, 5, 3 5 - 3 6 ; and muse-relationship, 70; and scapegoat, 74 Discontinuity, 15, 3 4 - 3 5 , 45, 4 6 - 4 7 , 5 5 - 5 6 , 57-59, 70, 86, 91, 112, 122-123; between present and literary past, 5, 3 8 - 3 9 , 41, 93-94. See also Continuity Distancing, 105, 109, 114, 115, 119 Dodds, E. R., 5 8 - 5 9 , 67, 69, 70, 74 Dryden, John, 6, 8, 3 8 - 3 9 , 4 1 , 127 n; Absalom and Achitophel, 6; An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 38-39 Dualism, 9, 35, 38, 66. See also Nature, estrangement from Duff, William, 62 Elegy, 103-109 Enlightenment, 96, 104; as disenchantment, 4 - 5 , 3 7 - 3 8 , 78 Epiphany, 66, 85, 86, 110-111, 122 Fall, 3 1 - 3 2 , 3 3 - 3 6 , 54, 58, 78, 8 2 - 8 3 , 122; redressing of, 19, 2 1 - 2 2 , 24, 2 7 - 2 9 , 44, 89, 100, 120-121 Feeling (passion), 47, 49, 5 1 - 5 2 , 54, 5 8 - 5 9 , 77, 79, 98 Finch, Anne, 103 Fish, Stanley, 44 Fletcher, Angus, 55, 57 Foucault, Michel, 79

Freud, Sigmund, 69 Frye, Northrop, 5 4 - 5 5 , 81 Garrod, H. W., 106 Genius, 27, 86, 89; genius loci, 69, 107-108, 120 Geographical speculation, 17-18, 82, 84, 85-86, 94 Gibbon, Edward, 58, 59 Gradualism, 111-112, 114, 116, 122 Gray, Thomas, 8, 9, 37, 74, 81, 103; "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," 104-105, 113; "The Progress of Poesy," 8 Greek Anthology, 105 Hamilton, William, 15-16 Hartman, Geoffrey, 67, 99, 103-104, 110-111, 118, 121, 123 Hazlitt, William, 3 Hegel, G. F. W., 69 Historical consciousness, 38, 84 Hobbes, Thomas, 8, 38 Hogarth, William, 52 Hogg, James, 130 η Hurd, Richard, 6 2 - 6 3 , 80, 98 Imagination: as curse, 5 3 - 5 4 , 7 1 - 7 3 , 77; naturalizing of, 119; and reason, 21,37-38,43,78,83,94-95, 98-99, 100-101; separation of, from nature, 4 8 - 5 0 . See also Collins, and fear of imaginative possibility Incarnation, 66, 84; of poetical character, 2 5 - 2 6 , 35 Influence: as daemonic, 5, 3 5 - 3 6 ; as generous, 10-11, 96, 102, 1 0 9 110; of Milton as opposed to Shakespeare, 9; of Milton on Augustans, 6 - 7 ; of Milton on Romantics, 12-14; of Milton on Sensibility poets, 7-10; as at once positive and negative, 13, 27; satire as means of resisting, 6, 12; as seduction, 8-9; as stifling, 10, 16, 26, 27, 32, 35-36, 48, 50, 75, 90; undoing of, 68, 105 Inner Light, 9, 21, 2 4 - 2 5 , 4 2 - 4 3 , 61, 100 Johnson, Samuel, 6-7, 53, 67, 7 9 - 8 0 , 8 4 - 8 5 , 100 Keats, John, 3, 12-13, 63. Works: The Fall of Hyperion, 13, 32; Hyperion,

Index 1 2 - 1 3 ; "Sleep and Poetry," 12; "To Autumn," 13, 117-118 Kierkegaard, Søren, 4, 69, 74-75 Langhorne, John, 15, 82 Liberty, 41, 43, 47, 84-93 Longinus, 50 Lowth, Robert, 18-62 Madness, 71, 77, 79-80 Mallet, P. H., 85 Marvell, Andrew, 8, 84 Melancholy, 45, 71, 106, 113, 1 2 1 122; and nature, 103-105, 108 Milton, John: antipictorial bias of, 11, 109, 115; apocalyptic humanism of, 2 4 - 2 5 ; aural bias of, 2 8 - 2 9 ; authority of, 8; and Christianity, 24, 84, 100; deified, 8-9, 27, 29; egotism of, 9, 56, 61; and externalization of daemonic, 54; as Hebraic genius, 19; influence of, on Augustans, 6-7; influence of, on Romantics, 12-14; influence of, on Sensibility poets, 7-10; and millenarianism, 42, 92; nationalism of, 87, 9 1 - 9 2 ; as poet of the Sublime, 8-9; problematic relation of truth and fabling in, 81, 99-100, 102; and reconciliation of imagination and reason, 8 0 - 8 1 , 83-84; and renunciation of strength, 13, 3 1 - 3 2 , 100; revolutionary temperament of, 7, 12; temporal consciousness of, 4 2 - 4 3 ; tenderness of, 102, 110. Works: "Ad Patrem," 62; Animadversions, 2 1 - 2 2 , 42; An Apology for Smectymnuus, 18-19, 33; "Arcades," 2 7 - 2 8 , 33; Areopagitica, 24, 75, 84, 87, 9 1 - 9 3 , 130 n; "At a Solemn Music," 6 0 - 6 1 ; Comus, 18, 19, 28, 7 3 - 7 4 , 7 5 - 7 7 , 81, 84, 89, 9 5 - 9 6 , 99, 120, 121; "The Fifth Ode of Horace" ("Ad Pyrrham"), 109; "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," 20, 23, 4 3 - 5 0 , 56, 57, 6 7 - 6 8 , 70, 82, 95, 103, 106, 109, 111, 112-113, 114-116, 117, 118, 119-120, 121, 123, 128 n, 129 n, 132; "Lycidas" 27, 28, 30, 82, 83-84, 89-90, 96, 102, 105-109,113,131 n; "Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity,"

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42, 56, 96; Of Reformation, 42; Paradise Lost, 6, 7, 8, 9 , 1 8 , 2 0 - 2 2 , 24-25,26,27,29,31,32-36, 4 2 - 4 3 , 50, 54, 65, 71, 87, 93, 96, 99-100, 101, 102, 109, 110, 111, 120-123, 127 n, 130 n; Paradise Regained, 32, 100, 125 n; The Reason of Church Government, 130 n; "Sonnet 8," 125 n; Tetrachordon, 21 Modernism, 93-94, 124 Muse, 16, 21, 22, 24, 29, 30, 56, 119, 121; as daemonic, 70; lower and higher, 17-18; Milton as, 7, 16, 36 Myth (mythopoeia), 19-20, 37, 61, 6 2 - 6 3 ; Collins' quest for, 7 7 - 9 3 ; decline of, in Enlightenment, 5, 81; and madness, 79; of progress, 8 4 - 9 3 ; as protective, 77, 91, 97; and the psychological, 66, 76-77; as reconciler of imagination and reason, 8 1 - 8 3 ; Romantic internalization of, 12, 100, 101. See also Romance Nature, 106, 107-108, 116, 120; estrangement from, 46, 48, 49, 56, 103-104, 116; and imagination, 4 6 - 4 7 , 4 8 - 4 9 , 50, 119; and melancholy, 103-105, 108; and natural supernaturalism, 44, 104-105, 111, 117, 119 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 14, 55, 71 Oracle, 69, 119 Originality, 3,39, 41,84 Otway, Thomas, 40, 49, 50 Paradise, 3 2 - 3 3 , 8 2 - 8 3 , 120-124; lost, 8 2 - 8 3 , 1 0 3 , 121-124; momentary, 122; poet's, 2 7 - 2 9 , 31, 82; within, 31, 100 Parnell, Thomas, 43, 78, 103 Pastoral, 49, 81-84, 105-107, 119, 121, 123; Milton's attitude toward, 84, 102, 106-107 Pathos, 52, 5 6 - 5 7 , 60, 117 Personification, 23, 3 5 - 3 6 , 4 6 , 6 3 - 6 7 ; as daemonic, 57, 59, 67-70; naturalizing of, 11, 116-117, 119; and the Sublime, 23, 63 Pictorialism, 11, 64. See also Collins, antipictorial bias of

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Index

Pindar, 15, 50, 70 Pope, Alexander, 6, 1 0 , 4 0 - 4 1 , 63, 73, 7 8 - 7 9 , 81. Works: The Dunciad, 6, 41; An Essay on Man, 6; "Messiah," 6; The Rape of the Lock, 6, 82 Prayer, 5 1 , 5 6 - 5 7 , 60, 117 Price, Martin, 115 Progress, 18-19, 45, 47, 48, 94, 111, 112, 130 n; halted, 3 9 - 4 1 ; myth of, 8 4 - 9 3 ; and poetic regress, 4 - 5 , 41-42 Prophecy (prophetic), 7 - 8 , 2 1 - 2 2 , 2 5 , 73, 76, 87, 92, 100, 106, 107; and romance, 17-19 Ramsay, Allan, 43 Reconciliation, 44, 80-84, 116-117, 123 Reed, Amy, 103 Repetition, 15, 2 2 - 2 3 , 35, 55, 70, 111, 116; incremental, 45, 47 Repression, 68, 69 Romance, 78-79, 85, 94, 98-100, 101, 104, 119; Miltonic purgation of, 6 7 - 6 8 ; Miltonic struggle with, 99-100; and prophecy, 17-19. See also Myth Romantics (Romanticism), 3; and Collins, 12-13,100,101,124; and Milton, 12-14, 100 Satan, 7, 53; and Collins, 3 2 - 3 6 , 54; fall of, 33-36 Schlüter, Kurt, 120 Self-consciousness, 3, 4, 9, 13-14, 15, 26,37,39,46-49,50,51,54, 55-56, 59, 7 0 - 7 1 , 78, 94, 123; resistance to, 112-113; and Satan's fall, 3 4 - 3 5 , 54. See also Unselfconsciousness Sensibility, poets of, 3, 12, 72, 81, 8 4 - 8 5 ; aural bias of, 28, 43; and Milton, 7-10 Sexuality, 15-16, 20, 26; angelic, 22, 35; chaste, 121; and knowledge, 35; and muse-relationship, 21, 5 6 - 5 7 , 119 Shakespeare, William, 5, 9, 39,40, 4 1 , 77, 80, 85, 105, 106, 127 η Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 12, 93

Shenstone, William, 43, 78 Simplicity, 43, 47-49 Smart, Christopher: Jubilate Agno, 3, 55 Solipsism, 35, 56, 103 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 28, 76, 98 Spectral consciousness, 33, 36, 53 Spenser, Edmund, 5, 16, 17, 18, 19-20, 33, 41, 64, 80, 84, 85, 99, 102 Sterne, Laurence, 43, 52; Tristram Shandy, 55 Stevens, Wallace, 98 Sublimation, 68, 103, 104 Sublime, 3, 8, 1 9 , 2 1 , 2 3 , 2 8 , 4 3 , 4 8 - 4 9 , 5 0 - 5 1 , 59, 62, 66, 85, 102; and anxiety, 17; and Beautiful, 17-18, 19-20, 2 9 - 3 0 , 80; egotistical, 9; Milton as poet of, 8-9 Subsuming, 5, 79, 84, 100 Sun-as-poet, 2 2 - 2 5 , 29-30 Swift, Jonathan, 78 Tasso, Torquato, 98-99 Thomson, James, 28, 43, 52, 80, 81, 103, 105-109, 123; The Seasons, 9 Tickell, Thomas, 78 Time (temporality), 4 1 - 4 3 , 89, 91, 93, 108, 122-123; consciousness of, in Collins, 4 1 - 4 2 ; consciousness of, in Milton, 4 2 - 4 3 ; as fallen, 3 6 , 4 1 - 4 2 , 43, 122-123; and the moment, 52, 61 Timelessness, 42, 45, 51, 55, 89 Uncanny, 35, 104, 105 Unself-consciousness, 20, 26, 4 3 - 4 5 , 5 0 - 5 1 , 5 5 , 5 8 , 7 0 - 7 1 , 1 1 2 , 118. See also Self-consciousness Usenet, Η. Κ., 59, 69 Van den Berg, J. H., 103 Vision (visionary), 11, 2 2 - 2 3 , 2 4 - 2 5 , 35, 61, 7 1 , 79, 102-103. See also Imagination, separation of, from nature Warburton, William, 38 Warton, Joseph, 9, 28, 41, 43, 63-64, 67, 78, 80, 103; " O d e to Fancy," 50-51 Warton, Thomas, 9, 28, 43, 80, 98, 103,115

Index Wasserman, Earl, 18 Wittreich, Joseph, 13 Wordsworth, William, 3, 10, 12, 13, 67 Wounding, 34, 53-54, 90-91 Yeats, William Butler, 74, 94, 101 Young, Edward, 9, 28, 85, 103

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