To Paint the Finest Features of the Mind

Amidst the vagaries and caprices of literary history, it is sometimes relatively easy to see when (and why) certain kinds of writing lose their appeal. The decline of didactic poetry since the eighteenth century has been absolute, and it is as unlikely to make a comeback as the utopian socialist novel, or the practice of publishing a scientific treatise initially in Latin. It is not coincidental that an effect of this decline in the nineteenth century was a cessation of interest in the poetry of Mark Akenside (1720–70), as the major reason for his high poetic reputation was The Pleasures of Imagination, his enormously successful poem of 1744, which sought to inform his audience about the workings and purpose of what we would call their aesthetic responses. The proto-Reithian nature of such an undertaking – its idea of entertainment through education – is one reason why didactic poetry is not the most fashionable of academic backwaters; this critical study is a continuation of the attempt by Robin Dix over the last two decades to return Akenside to his rightful place as one of the most influential of eighteenth-century poets.

One good reason why Akenside deserves attention is the intellectual seriousness and commitment of his writing, and indeed of his life: Dix eschews a specifically biographical approach ( partly because there is not much to go on for long stretches, and what there is has been documented by C. T. Houpt's 1944 biography), providing instead a chronological critical account of Akenside's work, but it is relevant to his discussion that Akenside was a youthful prodigy in the Cowleyian vein. Moreover, after the height of his productivity in the 1740s (when The Pleasures of Imagination was accompanied by literary journalism, a volume of odes and a fine satire, the Epistle to Curio), Akenside stopped publishing except for the odd occasional poem and started a medical career that would become distinguished (including, by the 1760s, the role of physician-in-ordinary to Queen Charlotte). A clever man, he was also fastidious, revising publications carefully, though not always to their advantage. The obscurity of much of his life has prevented his personality from coming across, except as somewhat cold and Spartan: Johnson (while praising the blank verse of The Pleasures as being inferior only to Milton) bemoaned his arrogant Whiggish cant, and Smollett satirised him as the affected Doctor in Peregrine Pickle; only the curmudgeonly Sir John Hawkins went out of his way to praise his character.¹

Yet, as a poet, Akenside very soon acquired the highest of reputations. In 1744 Dodsley acted on Pope's glowing reader's report, and paid £120 for The Pleasures of Imagination. It was a sound investment: in Akenside's lifetime alone, the poem went through seven editions and was translated into French, German, and Italian. It would be republished, either singly or as part of a collection, in every decade from 1740 to 1890. The decline of his reputation meant that it would then, however, be over a century before his poems were collected again, in Dix's comprehensive edition of 1996. The success of The Pleasures suggests that it was indeed read with pleasure, rather than with the forbearance given to works only of instruction. As Dix repeatedly claims, there is a zest and enthusiasm in the poem that show its youthful author full of energy in conveying his philosophic message.

That message is concerned with what Dix calls 'a reconciliation of philosophy and poetry' (p. 134). In bald summary, it describes how the workings of the imagination (and its recognition of beauty, truth, and virtue) indicate an inherent sense of moral judgement, which in turn points to the providential wider order of nature and human happiness. Its three books move from the external world to the imagination that perceives it, via the mind. It takes the Addisonian categories of the sublime, the wonderful, and the beautiful to describe what provokes...