Neoclassical World-Making in William Collins’s Odes

ABSTRACT William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1746) is steeped in a classical Greek heritage with which the poet engages on two levels: his odes to Pity, Simplicity, Fear, and Liberty, as well as that on the Poetical Character, invoke the classical form of the Pindaric ode, while at the level of poetics he introduces classical ideas such as haplotes to define both the mode and mythopoeic frameworks of his odes. This article will examine the ways in which Collins’s Neoclassicism is informed by a looking back to and aligning with the odic tradition at the same time that he is engaged in acts of poetic world-making. It will also investigate how he recreates and invents a neoclassical mythopoeia to fashion a new kind of ode that—even though formally and ideationally inflected by classicism—is re-occasioned through the poet’s use of a personal lyric stance.