The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside

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Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1996 - 594 Seiten
"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

Im Buch

Inhalt

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
Index of Names in the Introduction and Commentary
583
Index of Titles and First Lines
592
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Seite 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...
Seite 153 - The powers of man; we feel within ourselves His energy divine; he tells the heart, He meant, he made us to behold and love What he beholds and loves, the general orb Of life and being; to be great like him, Beneficent and active.
Seite 152 - Each passing hour sheds tribute from her wings ; And still new beauties meet his lonely walk, And loves unfelt attract him. Not a breeze Flies o'er the meadow, not a cloud imbibes The setting Sun's effulgence, not a strain From all the tenants of the warbling shade Ascends, but whence his bosom can partake Fresh pleasure, unreproved.
Seite 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.
Seite 379 - Lull'd by the murmur of my rising fount, I slumber ; here my clustering fruits I tend ; Or, from the humid flowers at break of day, Fresh garlands weave, and chase from all my bounds Each thing impure or noxious.
Seite 231 - In idle darkness, am alive to thoughts Of honourable fame, of truth divine Or moral, and of minds to virtue won By the sweet magic of harmonious verse ; The themes which now expect us.
Seite 207 - Caesar's fate, Amid the crowd of patriots ; and his arm Aloft extending, like eternal Jove, When guilt brings down the thunder, call'd aloud On Tully's name, and shook his crimson steel, And bade the father of his country hail ? For lo ! the tyrant prostrate on the dust, And Rome again is free...
Seite 449 - No radiant pearl, which crested fortune wears, No gem, that twinkling hangs from beauty's ears, Nor the bright stars, which night's blue arch adorn, Nor rising suns that gild the vernal morn, Shine with such lustre, as the tear that breaks, For others' wo, down Virtue's manly cheeks.
Seite 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.
Seite 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...

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