Collins, William

8vo, 24 pp., first edition of the author's first work,  subscriber's copy, recent dark green morocco, a fine copy

Foxon C298; Rothschild 653; CBEL II, 586

 

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One of the great rarities of 18th-century poetry.  Only two copies have appeared at auction since the beginning of the 20th century: one in 1900, and the other at the Slater sale in 1982 (a copy acquired from the Pforzheimer Library). The ledgers of the printer Henry Woodfall reveal that the print run was 500 copies; of these the ESTC now records 12 copies in institutions worldwide.

These four eclogues were written by Collins in 1739, when he was 17 and a student at Winchester School. At the time of publication, three years later, he was an Oxford undergraduate.  In these poems Collins followed the conventions of pastoral verse, but at the same time attempted to create something new by adding an element of orientalism.

This effort to break free of what Roger Lonsdale has called "the inhibiting rationality and omnipresent social tone of much Augustan poetry" was successful to the extent that the poems remained popular for the rest of the 18th century. They mark the beginning of the pre-Romantic school of Gray, Warton, and Chatterton, and are the first in a series of British adaptations of Persian poetry which culminated in Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat more than a century later.