William Collins, grace and the “cest of amplest power”

Abstract

The aesthetic concept of “grace” has usually been neglected by scholars in favour of the Burkean sublime. This article aims to contextualise the complexity of the idea of grace by relating it to discussions of ethics, religion and literature, considering, among others, critics such as Shaftesbury, William Warburton, John Gilbert Cooper and Schiller. William Collins’s “Ode on the Poetical Character” (1746) will be read against the complexity of this idea; especially one image, that of the “cest of amplest power,” the cestus of chastity (Spenser) and inspiration (Collins), will be considered as a medium through which poetic inspiration can be conferred on the supplicating poet. Collins’s rewriting and inverting of traditional (creation) gender stereotypes, the ambivalent mythological figure of Aphrodite, Spenser’s Florimel episode as well as Collins’s manipulations of myths and texts culminate in a unique application of the concept of grace which testifies to the importance that such an important poet as Collins assigned to it.