ABSTRACT

No author-no matter how “unknown”—exists alone. An Collins has often been portrayed since 1815 as a “poet nearly anonymous”; her collection of poems, Divine Songs and Meditacions (1653), as “so rare as to be, probably, unique.”2 The sole extant copy of Divine Songs and Meditacions resides at the Huntington Library, shelfmark RB 54047 (Wing C5355). Although several nineteenth-century bibliographers and book collectors report a 1658 printing, no such volume has since been seen. In one of her most frequently discussed texts, “The Discourse,” Collins imagines her future anonymity and suggests her readers may “find, / This”—that is, her words received “hereafter” as if “by accident”—and therein

1 An Collins, “The Discourse,” Divine Songs and Meditacions, ed. Sidney Gottlieb (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1996), 50-56. All further works from this edition will be cited parenthetically in the text: page numbers for “To the Reader” and line numbers for the poems. This introductory essay draws upon my research and publications since 1998 concerning Collins, the seventeenth-century poetic elegy, and early modern historiography, advancing that body of work into new levels of engagement with the field. See notes 3, 9, 11, 32, 69, and 81, below.