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COLUMN David Jarman Not prose ≠ poetry In as much as the poet William Hayley is remembered at all these days, it is not for his ‘bad verses’ but for his extensive patronage of the arts; always wellintentioned, not always happy in its execution. The poet William Cowper, painter George Romney and sculptor John Flaxman are the most illustrious of Hayley’s protégés. And then, of course, there’s William Blake. Hayley was directly responsible for Blake’s three-year stay in Sussex. It’s the subject of an exhibition at Petworth House that we review on pages 42-3. Hayley was born in Chichester, and in 1795 he commissioned Flaxman’s monument to his fellow-poet, William Collins, who was born in Chichester on Christmas Day, 1721. The son of a respectable vendor of hats, and haberdasher, who was twice Mayor of Chichester, William Collins was educated at Winchester and Oxford. But thereafter, diverse trials and tribulations bedevilled his short life, not least of which was a chronic irresolution. Relative to his thirtyseven years, the undoubted literary reputation that he achieved in his lifetime was founded on surprisingly few poems. A tendency towards dissipation didn’t help, and, as the years slipped by, recurrent bouts of disabling depression, which at one time saw him confined to a House for Lunatics, took an increasing toll on his vitality. Dr Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets, took a pretty dim view of Collins’ creativity: ‘He affected the obsolete when it was not worthy of revival; and he put his words out of the common order, seeming to think… that not to write prose is certainly to write poetry’. Collins ahead of his time, perhaps! But if he did not favour the work, Dr Johnson was sympathetic to the man. One passage, recycled in Lives of the Poets, is so eloquent and generousspirited that it deserves to be quoted at length: ‘His morals were pure, and his opinions pious: in a long continuance of poverty, and long habits of dissipation, it cannot be expected that any character should be exactly uniform. There is a degree of want by which the freedom of agency is almost destroyed; and long association with fortuitous companions will at last relax the strictness of truth, and abate the fervour of sincerity. That this man, wise and virtuous as he was, passed always unentangled through the snares of life, it would be prejudice and temerity to affirm; but it may be said that at least he preserved the source of action unpolluted, that his principles were never shaken, that his distinctions of right and wrong were never confounded, and that his faults had nothing of malignity or design, but proceeded from some unexpected pressure, or casual temptation’. In his declining years, Collins was cared for by his sister in Chichester. He died June 12th, 1759, and is buried in St Andrew’s Church in East Street. Flaxman’s monument to Collins, in Chichester Cathedral, is to be found, appropriately enough, close by to the recumbent figures that inspired Philip Larkin’s poem, An Arundel Tomb. Portrait of William Collins 29