An edition of Poems (1772)

The poetical works of Mark Akenside

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Last edited by MARC Bot
7 hours ago | History
An edition of Poems (1772)

The poetical works of Mark Akenside

  • 5.00 ·
  • 1 Rating
  • 3 Want to read
  • 0 Currently reading
  • 1 Have read

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.

Publish Date
Language
English
Pages
594

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Previews available in: English

Edition Availability
Cover of: The poetical works of Mark Akenside
The poetical works of Mark Akenside
1996, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Associated University Presses
in English
Cover of: The poetical works of Mark Akenside.
Cover of: The poetical works of Mark Akenside
Cover of: The poetical works of Mark Akenside
The poetical works of Mark Akenside
1863, Little, Brown and Company
Electronic resource
Cover of: Poetical works of Mark Akenside
Poetical works of Mark Akenside: with memoir and critical dissertation
1857, James Nichol, James Nisbet & Co., W. Robertson
Cover of: The poetical works of Mark Akenside.
The poetical works of Mark Akenside.
1854, Little, Brown and Company, Evans and Dickerson; [etc., etc.]
in English
Cover of: The poems of Mark Akenside, M.D.
The poems of Mark Akenside, M.D.
1772, Printed by W. Bowyer and J. Nichols: and sold by J. Dodsley
in English

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Book Details


Edition Notes

Includes bibliographical references (p. [557]-582) and indexes.

Published in
Madison, NJ, London

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
821/.6
Library of Congress
PR3310.A5 D59 1996, PR3310

The Physical Object

Pagination
594 p. :
Number of pages
594

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL792968M
Internet Archive
poeticalworksofm0000aken_f1a9
ISBN 10
0838635350
LCCN
95025560
OCLC/WorldCat
33164528
Goodreads
4344755

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History

Download catalog record: RDF / JSON
7 hours ago Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
October 17, 2022 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
August 11, 2020 Edited by MARC Bot remove fake subjects
September 16, 2018 Edited by Lisa Added new cover
December 9, 2009 Created by WorkBot add works page