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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Mark Akenside produced two versions of his best-known poem, The Pleasures of Imagination, which appeared in 1744 and consists of three books. The second version, with its slightly altered title, The Pleasures of the Imagination, was unfinished at his death in 1770. We have, however, two complete books of it and portions of two others. The revised version of Book I was printed in 1757 for circulation among Akenside's friends; Book II of the later version appeared in a similar fashion in 1765. Not much attention has been given by critics and commentators to the differences between the two versions of the poem. They have contented themselves with observing merely that such differences exist. But it is clear that Akenside took pains with his revision, and the changes he made reflect both an increase in his poetic powers and his intense involvement with the political and cultural history of his time. He is not only a capable poet, he is that valuable thing, a “representative figure.”
1 Marjorie Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse (Princeton, 1946), p. 137: an excellent brief discussion of this counterattack.
2 For example: A. O. Aldridge, “The Eclecticism of Mark Akenside's The Pleasures of Imagination,” JHI, v (1944), 292: the “revised version is fragmentary and poetically and logically inferior to the 1744 edition”; Dwight Durling, Géergic Tradition and English Poetry (New York, 1935), p. 113: “the new version did not promise to excel the old in poetic spirit… ”; Edmund Gosse, “Mark Akenside, Poet and Physician,” Living Age, xxiv (1921), 789: “… The Pleasures of the Imagination [sic], which Akenside completely rewrote without improving.” Only William Hazlitt seems to have thought that the revised version is superior; see Lectures on the English Poets (New York, 1914), p. 119: “He improved his Pleasures of the Imagination by pruning away a great many redundances of style and ornament.” None of these critics, including Hazlitt, provides any evidence to support such judgments.
3 The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside, ed. Rev. Alexander Dyce (Boston, 1863), p. 79.
4 The text employed in this essay is that of the Poems (London, 1772), edited by Jeremiah Dyson. This is considered the authoritative text, and all of the familiar modern editions of Akenside use it. However, although the 1772 text of the early version of Akenside's poem purports to be “as first published,” it differs in certain very minor respects from the text actually published in 1744. Akenside evidently attempted to tinker with his early poem a bit before deciding upon the extensive rewriting which is the subject of this essay. Numerals in parentheses are line numbers.
5 See Akenside's footnote to Bk. ii, l. 30; also Aldridge, “The Eclecticism of… The Pleasures of Imagination.” p. 292.
6 Newton Demands the Muse, pp. 86–87.
7 The date usually given is 1756; but see F. A. Pottle, “Burke on the Sublime and Beautiful,” N&Q, CXXVII (1925), 80, and Helen Drew, “The Date of Burke's Sublime and Beautiful,” MLN, I (1935), 29–31.
8 See the “Advertisement” which Dyson wrote and which appears at the front of his, and subsequent, editions of the poems.
9 Akenside may have intended to write more than 4 books; what I call Book iv here would then have been the last book.
10 For example, Bk. ii, 11. 343–350 become Bk. ii, ll. 257–264; Bk. iii, ll. 23–77, reworked, become Bk. ii, ll. 417–503; Bk. i, ll. 501–526 become Bk. ii, ll. 336–373.
11 Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1953), p. 64.
