William Collins and Haplotes

William Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1746) demonstrates and reveals its author’s knowledge of and preoccupation with form, modes, and ideas. The collection has commonly served as the focus of studies of Collins’s art, while his earlier drafts and fragments (since their publication in 1956) have not triggered any significant scholarly engagement. To a large degree, criticism of Collins’s poetry has focused on a handful of poems, with the “Ode to Evening” and “Ode on the Poetical Character” as clear favorites of the critics. This essay understands itself as a reading of Collins’s odes that emphasizes the ideational complexity of the collection. By focusing on the fragmentary “To Simplicity” (ante 1746) and “Ode to Simplicity,” I will discuss the importance that the classical Greek idea of haplotes had for the poet. My explication of the deified Simplicity and the concept of simplicity will not only contribute to the understanding of the poet’s Hellenism but will also shed light on a spiritual entity that he connects genealogically with the emanation of the creative imagination, Fancy.¹ My discussion of the conceptualized abstraction Simplicity also draws on the widespread semantic variations of simplicity as the more formal and stylistic feature of Latin simplicitas, found in the literature of the eighteenth century; I suggest that it is indispensable to negotiate both the classical and the eighteenth-century meanings of simplicity to gain a sense of the comprehensive vision that Collins saw embodied in the deity of his ode whom in “To Simplicity” he addresses as “Chaste un-boastful Guide.”²

Raymond Dexter Havens, one of the most important historians of the notion of simplicity during this period, observes that in the eighteenth century, “critics, essayists, and poets were constantly referring” to simplicity “as the supreme excellence in almost every field . . . whether of conduct, thought, taste, or artistic production.”³ Despite critics’ awareness of the truth of Havens’s statement, there has not been any sustained attempt at understanding simplicity critically, formulating a definitional framework for the notion or establishing a conceptual background that could serve to comprehend the vague and diffuse implications of simplicity in both cultural and poetic terms. Most readers of eighteenth-century poetry have remained content with Francis Gallaway’s statement that “[m]inor divergences in definition occur, but, in general, simplicity implied clarity; in diction, the avoidance of Latin coinages and of difficult words in favour of a colloquial ease which would have precision as its ally; in thought, the elimination both of the ‘conceit’ and of ‘false wit’; in presentation, the abandonment of elaborate artifice.”⁴ James Sutherland, similarly, reads simplicity as a stylistic feature. In his view, it entails “[r]estraint, propriety, an absence of emphasis,”⁵ in other words, Johnsonian universality and the avoiding of unique features that contribute to particularization.

In its vagueness, simplicity has been recruited by defenders of neoclassical poetics as well as by those who, at mid century, experimented with modes and genre and who almost unanimously agreed that any renovation in style would have to be inspired by criteria of simplicity, both stylistically and rhetorically. The mid century as a period of change in poetic norms and ideals is a period in which writers deploy simplicity most diffusely as a concept. Aaron Hill, in the “Preface” to The Creation (1720), speaks of “terrible simplicity,”⁶ meaning the equally definitionally vague sublime of the kind that John Dennis had defined at the beginning of the century, while a writer in The British Magazine defines simplicity as “no other than beautiful nature, without affectation or extraneous ornament.”⁷ Writing to Samuel Richardson in response to the modesty and simplicity of Clarissa, Hill emphasizes the “instructive elegance of unaffected passion,” while Nicholas Rowe in The Fair Penitent equates innocence with simplicity, terming it “pure native truth.”⁸ Writing about Edmund Spenser, William Shenstone characterizes him as “remarkable for simplicity both of sentiment and phrase.”⁹ At the same time, he censures his friend James Thomson for the style of his Spenserian imitation, The Castle of Indolence: “Thomson’s diction was not reckon’d...