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| | Literary Encyclopedia: Collins, William (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-29) |
 | | His condition is described in different ways by his contemporaries: Warton calls it “a disordered or debilitated understanding”, John Ragsdale more dramatically as “a deplorable state of idiotism”, Thomas as deplorable langour of body, and dejection of mind', James Hampton said as a“ nervous disorder, which continued, with but short intervals, till his death. |
 | | Nevertheless, as part of a group of poets in the mid-eighteenth-century (alongside Joseph and Thomas Warton, and Mark Akenside), whom Johnson described as being “eminently delighted with those flights of imagination which pass the bounds of nature”, Collins became a major influence for poets who followed. |
 | | His close friend Joseph Warton produced a kind of manifesto for the new group which neatly encapsulates this aspect of Collins's work, setting against the poetry of “familiar life” (i.e. |
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