William Collins, né le 25 décembre 1721 à Chichester et mort le 12 juin 1759 dans la même ville, est un poète anglais.
Il débuta par des poésies qui ne reçurent pas d'abord du public l'accueil qu'elles méritaient, vécut dans un état voisin de la misère, perdit la raison dans ses dernières années et mourut en 1759, dans une maison d'aliénés.
On a de lui des Églogues orientales, 1742, et des Odes descriptives et allégoriques, qui le placent au rang des premiers poètes lyriques de l'Angleterre; on estime surtout l'Ode sur les passions. Une bonne édition de ses œuvres a été donnée par Alexander Dyce, avec notes, Londres, 1827.
Wikipedia
“Too nicely Jonson knew the critic's part;
Nature in him was almost lost in Art.”
To Sir Thomas Hammer on his Edition of Shakespeare.
Source: The Passions, an Ode for Music (1747), Line 57. Compare: "Sweetest melodies / Are those that are by distance made more sweet", William Wordsworth, Personal Talk, stanza 2.
“When Music, heavenly maid, was young,
While yet in early Greece she sung.”
Source: The Passions, an Ode for Music (1747), Line 1.
Samuel Johnson The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1781), "William Collins" http://www.bookrags.com/ebooks/4678/50.html
Criticism
“O Music! sphere-descended maid,
Friend of Pleasure, Wisdom's aid!”
Source: The Passions, an Ode for Music (1747), Line 95.
Source: Ode to Evening (1747) http://www.netpoets.com/classic/poems/017002.htm, line 9.
“Well may your hearts believe the truths I tell:
'T is virtue makes the bliss, where'er we dwell.”
Oriental Eclogues. 1, Line 5. Compare: "That virtue only makes our bliss below, / And all our knowledge is ourselves to know", Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle iv, line 397.
“By fairy hands their knell is rung,
By forms unseen their dirge is sung.”
Source: How Sleep the Brave (1748), line 7.
“How sleep the brave, who sink to rest,
By all their country’s wishes blest!”
Variante: How sleep the brave who sink to rest
By all their country's wishes blest!
Source: How Sleep the Brave (1748), line 1.
Source: Ode Occasioned by the Death of Mr. Thomson, (1748) http://www.luminarium.org/eightlit/collins/thomson.php, line 1.
Source: Ode to Evening (1747) http://www.netpoets.com/classic/poems/017002.htm, line 21.
Ode written in the year 1746. A variation of the first two lines is "By hands unseen the knell is rung; / By fairy forms their dirge is sung".
“Love of peace, and lonely musing,
In hollow murmurs died away.”
Source: The Passions, an Ode for Music (1747), Line 67.
Source: Ode Occasioned by the Death of Mr. Thomson, (1748) http://www.luminarium.org/eightlit/collins/thomson.php, line 29.
