William Collins

William Collins (1721-59), English poet, one of the finest lyric poets of his age. He was born in Chichester and educated at the University of Oxford. While at Oxford he published a volume of verse, Persian Eclogues (1742). Later, living in London on a small bequest, he published (1746) a volume of odes, but his health began to fail about 1749. He continued to write, without popular success, but winning the acclaim of the critic Samuel Johnson and the poets Oliver Goldsmith and Thomas Gray. Of Collins's relatively few poems, such pieces as “How Sleep the Brave,””Ode to Evening,””Ode to Simplicity,””The Passions” (all pub. between 1746 and 1750), and “Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland” (1750) are outstanding.