The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside"This is an edition of all the known poems of Mark Akenside, the eighteenth-century English poet and physician, whose poetry has not been newly edited for more than a century. This edition will thus provide scholars and students with a much-needed opportunity to reassess the extent of Akenside's contribution to literary culture, and it will also clarify his role in the development of the aesthetic theories of his own generation and the one that followed." "The career of Mark Akenside (1721-70) spans a period of extraordinarily fast change in English literature: his first major poem, The Pleasures of Imagination, appeared in the year of Pope's death; and Akenside died in the year Wordsworth was born. His works not only reflected the very considerable changes that took place during these years; they also contributed in many ways to the shifts in focus, interest, and emphasis that characterize the literature of the later eighteenth century." "Akenside's fascination with the imagination, its characteristics and functions, resulted in an intriguing and influential blend of the poetic and the philosophical in his longer poems, The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) and The Pleasures of the Imagination (1772). The earlier work explores the then new subject of aesthetics in greater detail than it had ever been explored before, presenting various original insights and arguments. Yet it would be wrong to see the poem as merely a versified philosophical treatise; its complex structure offers satisfactions beyond those of sequential logic, and the examples cited to illustrate the central ideas are imbued with considerable vigor and clarity. As products of, and contributors to, the eighteenth-century enthusiasm for aesthetics, Akenside's longer poems are captivating examples of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experiment in developing the philosophical poem into a major literary form. It is for this reason above all others that they are valued by Coleridge and the writers of the next generation." "Because of the comparative obscurity into which Akenside's works fell after the demise of the long philosophical poem in the latter part of the nineteenth century, they have not by and large attracted the attention of modern bibliographers. In this edition numerous bibliographical and textual puzzles presented by his poems are solved for the first time. The apparatus, meanwhile, demonstrates the full extent of the poet's urge to revise - an urge that extended from the wholesale rewriting of some poems to subtle alterations of textual minutiae, showing a mind and an ear alive to nuances of meaning and intonation."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved |
Contents
85 | |
90 | |
91 | |
110 | |
111 | |
The Argument of the Third Book | 134 |
Book III | 135 |
Akensides Notes | 154 |
a Fable | 392 |
The Poet A Rhapsody | 395 |
Occasiond by the Insults of the Spaniards and the present Preparations for War | 400 |
Hymn to Science | 406 |
Miscellaneous Poems | 409 |
An Ode | 410 |
For the Winter Solstice December 11 1740 | 414 |
An Epistle to Curio | 416 |
The Pleasures of Imagination | 175 |
The Argument of the first book | 177 |
Book I | 178 |
The Argument of the second book | 197 |
Book II | 198 |
Book III | 216 |
Book V | 230 |
Odes on Several Subjects | 235 |
Book I | 308 |
Akensides Notes | 352 |
Hymn to the Naiads | 359 |
Akensides Notes | 370 |
Inscriptions | 379 |
The Gentelmans Magazine Poems | 389 |
Akensides Notes | 426 |
A Song | 427 |
to Sir Francis Henry Drake Barl January MDCCXLIX OS | 428 |
Epode | 431 |
Commentary | 433 |
The Pinkerton Revisions | 529 |
Dysons Advertisement 1772 | 537 |
An Epistle to the Right Honourable William Pultney Esq Upon His late Conduct in Publick Affairs 1742 | 540 |
Table of Related Passages in the Pleasures of Imagination and the Pleasures of the Imagination | 549 |
List of Departures From Copytexts | 551 |
Bibliography | 557 |
583 | |
Index of Titles and First Lines | 592 |
Other editions - View all
POETICAL WORKS OF MARK AKENSID Mark 1721-1770 Akenside,George 1813-1878 Gilfillan No preview available - 2016 |
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic Akenside's Amherst College ancient apparatus appear arts awful bards beauty behold bosom breast British Philippic charms copytext David Fordyce delight Diodorus Siculus divine Dyson earth echoes edition Epistle Essay eternal fair fame fancy fate flame genius Gentleman's Magazine groves hand harmonious hath heart heaven honours Hymn John John Gilbert Cooper Joseph Warton laws letter Liberty Loeb Classical Library London Lucretius lyre manuscript Mark Akenside Milton mind moral Muse Naiads nature nature's Newcastle upon Tyne note by Akenside Nymphs o'er obvious errors Oxford Oxford Classical Texts Paradise Lost passions Pindar Pisistratus Pleasures of Imagination poem poet Poetical poetry pomp Pope pow'r praise printed published reference revised ridicule sacred scene shade Shaftesbury smiles song soul sublime thee things thou thro throne toil tongue truth University verse virtue voice vols William youth
Popular passages
Page 93 - From Heaven my strains begin: from Heaven descends The flame of genius to the human breast, And love and beauty, and poetic joy And inspiration. Ere the radiant sun Sprang from the east, or 'mid the vault of night The moon suspended her serener lamp; Ere mountains, woods, or streams adorn'd the...
Page 93 - Then liv'd the almighty One : then, deep retir'd In his unfathom'd essence, view'd the forms, The forms eternal of created things ; The radiant sun, the/ moon's nocturnal lamp, The mountains, woods, and streams, the rolling globe, And wisdom's mien celestial. From the first Of days, on them his love divine he fix'd, His admiration : till in time complete, What he admir'd and lov'd, his vital smile Unfolded into being.
Page 92 - Truth; and where Truth deigns to come, Her sister Liberty will not be far. Be present all ye Genii, who conduct The wandering footsteps of the youthful bard, New to your springs and shades : who touch his ear With finer sounds : who heighten to his eye The bloom of Nature, and before him turn The gayest, happiest attitude of things.
Page 106 - Look then abroad through Nature, to the range Of planets, suns, and adamantine spheres, Wheeling unshaken through the void immense ; And speak, O man ! does this capacious scene With half that kindling majesty dilate Thy strong conception, as when Brutus rose Refulgent from the stroke of...