Article published in «Textual Practice» —2008. — Vol. 22 — № 4 — pp. 613–633. DOI: 10.1080/09502360802457392.
The English Poet William Collins assembled a sequence of odes in the pindaric fashion for publication in 1746 under the title Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects. The title-page (which gives the date as 1747, though the volume actually appeared in December of the previous year) was adorned with a quite distinctive engraved device, even if not original in this use: within an oval chaplet of leaves and flowers, of which part is laurel and part fruits of the woods and fields, and all surmounted by the twin face-masks of joy and sorrow, is set a pair of musical instruments. Uppermost is a classical lyre, signalling the composure and equipoise of Apollo; and beneath can be seen a set of panpipes, signal of panic urgency and ungoverned passion. It can be assumed that the lyre’s superimposed control over the disorder of more primitive arousal is deliberate, but that this also recognises the tension in the ode format, between an overall due reconciliation and the dangerous excitements of risk-taking. It’s possible that the device was placed here by his publisher, Andrew Millar, who had also used it on the title-page of Thomson’s Seasons, also of 1746; but Collins well understood the force of such countermeasures, since his ‘Ode to Pity’ and the following ‘Ode to Fear’ stand in overt relation to his projected translation and ‘large commentary’ on Aristotle’s Poetics, even though the Aristotle project never materialised.
