Born in Chichester, Sussex, the son of a hatmaker and former mayor of the town, Collins was educated at The Prebendal School,[1] Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford.

Failing to obtain a university fellowship, being judged by a military uncle as 'too indolent even for the army', and having rejected the idea of becoming a clergyman, he settled for a literary career and was supported in London by a small allowance from his cousin, George Payne.

Following the failure of his collection of odes in 1747, Collins' discouragement, aggravated by drunkenness, so unsettled his mind that he eventually sank into insanity and by 1754 was confined to McDonald's Madhouse in Chelsea.

Jonathan Swift, John Gay and Mary Wortley Montagu had all transposed rural preoccupations to life in London in a series of "town eclogues"; at the same period William Diaper had substituted marine divinities for shepherds in his Nereides: or Sea-Eclogues (1712).

[10] Collins' Odes also fit within the context of a movement towards the renewal of the genre, although in this case it was largely formal and showed in his preference for pindarics and occasionally dispensing with rhyme.

"[12] Moreover, their new manner and stylistic excess lent themselves to burlesque parody, and one soon followed from a university miscellany in the shape of an "Ode to Horror: In the Allegoric Descriptive, Alliterative, Epithetical, Fantastic, Hyperbolical, and Diabolical Style".

As Gray had forecast, little favourable notice was taken at the time of poems so at odds with the Augustan spirit of the age, characterised as they were by strong emotional descriptions and the personal relationship to the subject allowed by the ode form.

Another factor was dependence on the poetic example of Edmund Spenser and John Milton, where Collins' choice of evocative word and phrase, and his departures from prose order in his syntax, contributed to his reputation for artificiality.

There, he asserted, "I have, I hope, Naturally introduc’d the Various Characters with which the Chorus was concern’d, As Oedopus, Medea, Electra, Orestes, &c &c. The Composition too is probably more correct, as I have chosen the ancient Tragedies as my Models.

While Dr Johnson wrote a sympathetic account of his former friend in Lives of the Poets (1781), he echoed Gray in dismissing the poetry as contrived and poorly executed.

There Pip describes his youthful admiration for a recitation of Collins' The Passions and commented ruefully, "I particularly venerated Mr. Wopsle as Revenge throwing his blood-stain'd Sword in Thunder down, and taking the War-denouncing Trumpet with a withering Look.

This charged that while the tombs of the unworthy were "by Flatt'ry's pen inscrib'd with purchas'd praise", those possessing genius and learning were "Alive neglected, and when dead forgot".

As well as showing the poet in pious contemplation, it depicts a lyre left upon the floor, accompanied by a scrolled copy titled "The Passions: an ode", representing his abandonment of poetry.

"[28] St Andrews, the church where Collins was buried, was converted to an arts centre in the 1970s, but the poet is now commemorated by a window on the south side drawing on the Flaxman memorial and showing him at his reading.