Post-Augustan nature in William Collins’s “Ode to Evening” (1746)
Apstrakt
For years “Nature” has been used as a key-term to categorise eighteenth- century poetry. The traditional dichotomy of Augustan “nature methodiz’d” and the Romantic guiding Nature of Wordsworth has come under stress and seen as more problematic than previously assumed. My article analyses the complex notion of nature that William Collins uses in his Ode to Evening of 1746. In this ode he addresses Eve (a metonymical representation of Nature) as a divine, active as well as spiritual force whose intimacy he is craving. Rather than Pope’s subdued, harmonised and regularised nature of “display,” Collins uses stylistic devices such as onomatopoeia and internal rhyme, and covers the landscape with a “gradual dusky veil” which blurs the definite character and outline of Augustan natura naturata in favour of a more allusive, anti-pictorial and synaesthetic atmospheric environment of Eve/Nature in which visuality and sight are secondary.
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