Collins, WILLIAM, a distinguished English poet, was born at Chichester, 25th December 1721. His father was a hatter in that town, of which he was several times mayor. Collins received the rudiments of his education at the prebendal school of his native town. At the age of twelve he was sent to Winchester School, where he remained seven years. While there he wrote his Oriental Eclogues, which in his own day, and for a considerable period afterwards, were the most popular of his productions. He was himself convinced that this preference was misplaced, and the world has long since come round to his opinion. In 1741 he proceeded to Oxford, where he was distinguished by 'his genius and indolence.' Having taken the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1743, he shortly afterwards left the university for reasons which are not accurately known. His private means being but slender, he obtained the title to a curacy, but was dissuaded from entering the church. As his only other alternative, he took up his residence in London, and sought to make a living by literature, a profession for which he was utterly unfitted by his desultory ways and uncertain health. He now fell into what are vaguely described as 'irregular habits,' and was at times reduced to the greatest straits. On one occasion Dr Johnson rescued him from the hands of bailiffs by obtaining an advance from a bookseller on the promise of Collins to translate the Poetics of Aristotle. It was during this period, however, that he wrote his Odes, upon which his fame as a poet now rests. They attracted no notice at the time of their publication, and they were little valued even by such contemporaries as Gray and Dr Johnson. By the death of an uncle in 1749, Collins inherited the sum of £2000, which enabled him to retire to Chichester, and apparently to pursue a regular course of study. It was about this time that he met Home, the author of Douglas, to whom he addressed his Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland, a poem in which, according to Mr Russell Lowell, 'the whole Romantic School is foreshadowed.' The ode was first published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1788). Before 1753, Collins felt the approaches of the mental disease to which he finally succumbed, and sought relief in a visit to France. On his return he gradually became worse, and in 1753 his reason completely gave way. He lived for six years longer in this state, though with lucid intervals. He died on 12th June 1759, so unknown to fame that no newspaper or magazine of the day has any notice of his death.
Collins, like Gray, holds a middle position between the school of Pope and the school of Wordsworth. In his maturer work he is almost completely free from the so-called 'poetic diction' of the 18th century. He has not the passionate feeling for nature of later poets, but his feeling is at least real and not conventional. In respect of natural poetic gifts, Coleridge, and Mrs Browning, and other high authorities, place him above his contemporary, Gray. His choice of subjects, however, and his subtler modes of treatment, debar him from the popularity of the author of the Elegy. His most highly finished ode is that To Evening, which is unsurpassed for exquisiteness of tone and diction. The ode entitled The Passions has merits of a different order, but evinces genius of even wider scope. The allegorical character of this ode and its companion pieces, To Liberty, To Mercy, and To Pity, removes them from direct human sympathy. That Collins was capable of simplicity and pathos, however, is shown by his two most popular poems, On the Death of the Poet Thomson, and his lines beginning 'How sleep the brave.'