William James - "Memories and Studies"

G. A. Henty - "At the Point of the Bayonet"

Erasmus Roterodamus - "Selections from Erasmus"

Angela Brazil - "The Jolliest School of All"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Poetical Works of Akenside

M >> Mark Akenside >> Poetical Works of Akenside




In October 1759 he delivered the Harveian oration before the College
of Physicians, and by their order it was published the next year. In
1761 Mr. T. Hollis presented him with a bed which had once belonged
to Milton, on the condition that he would write an ode to the memory
of that great poet. Akenside joyfully accepted the bed, had it set
up in his house, and, we suppose, slept in it; but the muse forgot
to visit _his_ "slumbers nightly," and no ode was ever produced.
We think that Akenside had sympathy enough with Milton's politics and
poetry to have written a fine blank-verse tribute to his memory,
resembling that of Thomson to Sir Isaac Newton; but odes of much
merit he could not produce, and yet at odes he was always sweltering

"With labour dire and weary woe."

In 1760, George the Third mounted the throne, and the author of the
"Epistle to Curio" began to follow the precise path of Pulteney. In
this he was preceded by Dyson, who became suddenly a supporter of
Lord Bute, and drew his friend in his train. By Dyson's influence
Akenside was appointed, in 1761, physician to the Queen. His
secession from the Whig ranks cost him a great deal of obloquy.
Dr. Hardinge had told the two turncoats long before "that, like a
couple of idiots, they did not leave themselves a loophole--they
could not _sidle away_ into the opposite creed." He never, however,
became a violent Tory partisan. It is singular how Johnson, with all
his aversion to Akenside, has no allusion to his apostasy, in which
we might have _a priori_ expected him to glory, as a proof of the
poet's inconsistency, if not corruption.

In one point Akenside differed from the majority of his tuneful
brethren, before, then, or since. He was a warm and wide-hearted
commender of the works of other poets. Most of our sweet singers
rather resemble birds of prey than nightingales or doves, and are at
least as strong in their talons as they are musical in their tongues.
And hence the groves of Parnassus have in all ages rung with the
screams of wrath and contest, frightfully mingling with the melodies
of song. Akenside, by a felicitous conjunction of elements, which
you could not have expected from other parts of his character, was
entirely exempted from this defect, and not only warmly admired Pope,
Young, Thomson, and Dyer, whose "Fleece" he corrected, but had kind
words to spare for even such "small deer" as Welsted and Fenton.

In 1763, he read a paper before the Royal Society, on the "Effects
of a Blow on the Heart," which was published in the _Philosophical
Transactions_ of the year. And, in 1764 he established his character
as a medical writer by an elegant and elaborate treatise on
"The Dysentery," still, we believe, consulted for its information,
and studied for the purity and precision of its Latin style. About
this time, too, he commenced a recasting of his "Pleasures of
Imagination," which he did not live to finish; and in which, on the
whole, there is more of laborious alteration than of felicitous
improvement. In 1766, Warburton, his old foe, who had now been made a
bishop, reprinted, in a new edition of his "Divine Legation of Moses,"
his attack on Akenside's notions about ridicule, without deigning to
take any notice of the explanations he had given in his reply. This
renewal of hostilities, coming, especially as it did, from the
vantage ground of the Episcopal bench, enraged our poet, and, by way
of rejoinder, he issued a lyrical satire which he had had lying past
him in pickle for fifteen years, and which nothing but a fresh
provocation would have induced him to publish. It was entitled
"An Ode to the late Thomas Edwards, Esq." Edwards had opposed
Warburton ably in a book entitled "Canons of Criticism," and was
himself a poet. The real sting of this attack lay in Akenside's
production of a letter from Warburton to Concanen, dated 2d January
1726, which had fallen accidentally into the hands of our poet; and
in which Warburton had accused Addison of plagiarism, and said that
when "Pope borrows it is from want of genius." Concanen was one of
the "Dunces," and it was, of course, Akenside's purpose to shew
Warburton's inconsistency in the different opinions he had expressed
at different times of them and of their great adversary. We know not
if the sturdy bishop took any notice of this ode. Even his Briarean
arms were sometimes too full of the controversial work which his
overbearing temper and fierce passions were constantly giving him.

In 1766, Akenside received the thanks of the College of Physicians
for an edition of Harvey's works, which he prepared for the press,
and to which he had prefixed a preface. In June 1767 he read before
the College two papers, one on "Cancers and Asthmas," and the other
on "White Swelling of the Joints," both of which were published the
next year in the first volume of the _Medical Transactions_. In the
same year, one Archibald Campbell, a Scotchman, a purser in the navy,
and called, from his ungainly countenance, "horrible Campbell,"
produced a small _jeu d'esprit_, entitled "Lexiphanes, imitated from
Lucian, and suited to the present times," in which he tries to
ridicule Johnson's prose and Akenside's poetry. His object was
probably to attract their notice, but both passed over this grin of
the "Grim Feature" in silent contempt. Akenside was still busy with
the revisal of his poem, had finished two books, "made considerable
progress with the third, and written a fragment of the fourth;" but
death stepped in and blighted his prospects, both as a physician,
with increasing practice and reputation, and as a poet, whose
favourite work was approaching what he deemed perfection. He was
seized with putrid fever; and, after a short illness, died on the 23
d June 1770 at an age when many men are in their very prime, both of
body and mind--that of 49. He died in his house in Burlington Street,
and was buried on the 28th in St. James's Church.

Akenside had been, notwithstanding his many acquaintances and friends,
on the whole, a lonely man; without domestic connexions, and having,
so far as we are informed, either no surviving relations or no
intercourse with those who might be still alive. He was not
especially loved in society; he wanted humour and good-humour both,
and had little of that frank cordiality which, according to Sidney
Smith, "warms and cheers more than meat or wine." He had far less
geniality than genius. Yet, in certain select circles, his mind,
which was richly stored with all knowledge, opened delightfully, and
men felt that he _was_ the author of his splendid poem. One of his
biographers gives him the palm for learning, next to Ben Jonson,
Milton, and Gray (he might perhaps have also excepted Landor and
Coleridge), over all our English poets.

In 1772, Mr. Dyson published an edition of his friend's poems,
containing the original form of the "Pleasures of Imagination," as
well as its half-finished second shape; his "Odes," "Inscriptions,"
"Hymn to the Naiads," etc., omitting, however, his poem to Curio in
its first and best version, and some of his smaller pieces. This
edition, too, contained an account of Akenside's life by his friend,
so short and so cold as either to say little for Dyson's heart, or a
great deal for his modesty and reticence. His uniform and munificent
kindness to the poet during his lifetime, however, determines us in
favour of the latter side of the alternative.

Of Akenside, as a man, our previous remarks have perhaps indicated
our opinion. He was rather a scholar somewhat out of his element,
and unreconciled to the world, than a thorough gentleman; irritable,
vehement, and proud--his finer traits were only known to his
intimates, who probably felt that in Wordsworth's words,

"You must love him ere to you
He doth, seem worthy of your love."

In religion his opinions seem to have been rather unsettled; but, of
whatever doubts he had, he gave the benefit latterly to the
Christian side--at least he was ever ready to rebuke noisy and
dogmatic infidelity. It is said that he intended to have included
the doctrine of immortality in his later version of the "Pleasures
of Imagination"--and even as the poem is, it contains some transient
allusions to that great object of human hope, although none, it must
be admitted, to its special Christian grounds.

We have now a very few sentences to enounce about his poetry, or,
more properly speaking, about his two or three good poems, for we
must dismiss the most of his odes, in their deep-sounding dulness,
as nearly unworthy of their author's genius. Up to the days of
Keats' "Endymion" and "Hyperion," Akenside's "Hymn to the Naiads"
was thought one of the best attempts to reproduce the classical
spirit and ideas. It now takes a secondary place; and at no time
could be compared to an actual hymn of Callimachus or Pindar, any
more than Smollett's "Supper after the Manner of the Ancients" was
equal to a real Roman Coena, the ideal of which Croly has so
superbly described in "Salathiel." His "Epistle to Curio" is a
masterpiece of vigorous composition, terse sentiment, and glowing
invective. It gathers around Pulteney as a ring of fire round the
scorpion, and leaves him writhing and shrivelled. Out of Dryden and
Pope, it is perhaps the best satiric piece in our poetry.

Of the "Pleasures of Imagination," it is not necessary to say a
great deal. A poem that has been so widely circulated, so warmly
praised, so frequently quoted and imitated--the whole of which
nearly a man like Thomas Brown has quoted in the course of his
lectures--must possess no ordinary merit. Its great beauty is its
richness of description and language--its great fault is its
obscurity; a beauty and a fault closely connected together, even as
the luxuriance of a tropical forest implies intricacy, and its
lavish loveliness creates a gloom. His attempt to express Plato's
philosophy in blank verse is not always successful. Perhaps prose
might better have answered his purpose in expressing the awfully
sublime thought of the "archetypes of all things existing in God."
We know that in certain objects of nature--in certain rocks, for
instance (such as Coleridge describes in his "Wanderings of Cain")--
there lie silent prefigurations and aboriginal types of artificial
objects, such as ships, temples, and other orders of architecture;
and it is so also in certain shells, woods, and even in clouds. How
interesting and beautiful those painted prophecies of nature, those
quiet hieroglyphics of God, those mystic letters, which, unlike
those on the Babylonian wall, do _not_,

"Careering shake,
And blaze IMPATIENT to be read,"

but bide calmly the time when their artificial archetypes shall
appear, and the "wisdom" in them shall be "justified" in these its
children! So, according to Plato, comparing great to small things,
there lay in the Divine mind the archetypes of all that was to be
created, with this important difference, that they lay in God
_spiritually_ and consciously. How poetical and how solemn to
approach, under the guidance of this thought, and gaze on the mind
of God as on an ancient awful mirror; and even as in a clear lake we
behold the forms of the surrounding scenery reflected from the white
strip of pebbled shore up to the gray scalp of the mountain summit,
and tremble as we look down on the "skies of a far nether world," on
an inverted sun, and on snow unmelted amidst the water; so to see
the entire history of man, from the first glance of life in the eye
of Adam, down to the last sparkle of the last ember of the general
conflagration, lying silently and inverted there--how sublime, but
at the same time how bewildering and how appalling! Our readers will
find, in the "Pleasures of Imagination," an expansion--perhaps they
may think it a dilution--of this Platonic idea.

They will find there, too, the germ of the famous theory of Alison
and Jeffrey about Beauty. These theorists held 'that beauty resides
not so much in the object as in the mind; that we receive but what
we give; that our own soul is the urn whence beauty is showered over
the universe; that flower and star are lovely because the mind has
breathed on them; that the imagination and the heart of man are the
twin beautifiers of creation; that the dwelling of beauty is not in
the light of setting suns, nor in the beams of morning stars, nor in
the waves of summer seas, but in the human spirit; that sublimity
tabernacles not in the palaces of the thunder, walks not on the
wings of the wind, rides not on the forked lightning, but that it is
the soul which is lifted up there; that it is the soul which, in its
high aspirings,'

"Yokes with whirlwinds and the northern blast,
and scatters grandeur around it on its way."

All this seems anticipated, and, as it were, coiled up in the words
of our poet:--

"Mind, mind alone (bear witness earth and heaven!)
The living fountains in itself contains
Of beauteous and sublime."

That Akenside was a real poet many expressions in his "Pleasures of
Imagination" prove, such as that just quoted--

"Yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast
Sweeps the long tract of day;"

but, taking his poem as a whole, it is rather a tissue of eloquence
and philosophical declamation than of imagination. He deals rather
in sheet lightning than in forked flashes. As a didactic poem it has
a high, but not the highest place. It must not be named beside the
"De Rerum Natura" of Lucretius, or the "Georgics" of Virgil, or the
"Night Thoughts" of Young; and in poetry, yields even to the
"Queen Mab" of Shelley. It ranks high, however, amongst that fine
class of works which have called themselves, by no misnomer,
"Pleasures;" and to recount all the names of which were to give an
"enumeration of sweets" as delightful as that in "Don Juan." How
cheering to think of that beautiful bead-roll--of which the
"Pleasures of Memory," "Pleasures of Hope," "Pleasures of Melancholy,"
"Pleasures of Imagination," are only a few! We may class, too, with
them, Addison's essays on the "Pleasures of Imagination" in _The
Spectator_, which, although in prose, glow throughout with the
mildest and truest spirit of poetry; and if inferior to Akenside in
richness and swelling pomp of words, and in dashing rhetorical force,
far excel him in clearness, in chastened beauty, and in those
inimitable touches and unconscious felicities of thought and
expression which drop down, like ripe apples falling suddenly across
your path from a laden bough, and which could only have proceeded
from Addison's exquisite genius.




CONTENTS.


THE PLEASURES OF IMAGINATION.

Book I.

Book II.

Book III.

Notes to Book I.

Notes to Book II.

Notes to Book III.


THE PLEASURES OF THE IMAGINATION.

Book I.

Book II.

Book III.

Book IV.


ODES ON SEVERAL SUBJECTS:--

Book I.--

Ode I. Preface.

Ode II. On the Winter-solstice, 1740.

Ode II. For the Winter-solstice, December 11, 1740.
As originally written.

Ode III. To a Friend, Unsuccessful in Love.

Ode IV. Affected Indifference. To the same.

Ode V. Against Suspicion.

Ode VI. Hymn to Cheerfulness.

Ode VII. On the Use of Poetry.

Ode VIII. On leaving Holland.

Ode IX. To Curio.

Ode X. To the Muse.

Ode XI. On Love. To a Friend.

Ode XII. To Sir Francis Henry Drake, Baronet.

Ode XIII. On Lyric Poetry.

Ode XIV. To the Honourable Charles Townshend; from the
Country.

Ode XV. To the Evening Star.

Ode XVI. To Caleb Hardinge, M. D.

Ode XVII. On a Sermon against Glory.

Ode XVIII. To the Right Honourable Francis, Earl of Huntingdon.



Book II.--

Ode I. The Remonstrance of Shakspeare.

Ode II. To Sleep.

Ode III. To the Cuckoo.

Ode IV. To the Honourable Charles Townshend; in the Country.

Ode V. On Love of Praise.

Ode VI. To William Hall, Esquire; with the Works of
Chaulieu.

Ode VII. To the Right Reverend Benjamin, Lord Bishop of
Winchester.

Ode VIII.

Ode IX. At Study.

Ode X. To Thomas Edwards, Esq.; on the late Edition
of Mr. Pope's Works.

Ode XI. To the Country Gentlemen of England.

Ode XII. On Recovering from a Fit of Sickness; in the
Country.

Ode XIII. To the Author of Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg.

Ode XIV. The Complaint.

Ode XV. On Domestic Manners.

Notes to Book I.

Notes to Book II.


HYMN TO THE NAIADS.

Notes.




INSCRIPTIONS:--

I. For a Grotto.

II. For a Statue of Chaucer at Woodstock.

III.

IV.

V.

VI. For a Column at Runnymede.

VII. The Wood Nymph.

VIII.

IX.


AN EPISTLE TO CURIO.

THE VIRTUOSO.

AMBITION AND CONTENT. A FABLE.

THE POET. A RHAPSODY.

A BRITISH PHILIPPIC.

HYMN TO SCIENCE.

LOVE. AN ELEGY.

TO CORDELIA.

SONG.





AKENSIDE'S POETICAL WORKS.


THE PLEASURES OF IMAGINATION.

A POEM, IN THREE BOOKS.

[Greek: 'Asebous men 'estin 'anthropou tas para tou theou
charitas 'atimazein.]
EPICT. apud Arrian. II. 23.


THE DESIGN.

There are certain powers in human nature which seem to hold a middle
place between the organs of bodily sense and the faculties of moral
perception: they have been called by a very general name, the Powers
of Imagination. Like the external senses, they relate to matter and
motion; and, at the same time, give the mind ideas analogous to
those of moral approbation and dislike. As they are the inlets of
some of the most exquisite pleasures with which we are acquainted,
it has naturally happened that men of warm and sensible tempers have
sought means to recall the delightful perceptions which they afford,
independent of the objects which originally produced them. This gave
rise to the imitative or designing arts; some of which, as painting
and sculpture, directly copy the external appearances which were
admired in nature; others, as music and poetry, bring them back to
remembrance by signs universally established and understood.

But these arts, as they grew more correct and deliberate, were, of
course, led to extend their imitation beyond the peculiar objects of
the imaginative powers; especially poetry, which, making use of
language as the instrument by which it imitates, is consequently
become an unlimited representative of every species and mode of being.
Yet as their intention was only to express the objects of imagination,
and as they still abound chiefly in ideas of that class, they, of
course, retain their original character; and all the different
pleasures which they excite, are termed, in general, Pleasures of
Imagination.

The design of the following poem is to give a view of these in the
largest acceptation of the term; so that whatever our imagination
feels from the agreeable appearances of nature, and all the various
entertainment we meet with, either in poetry, painting, music, or
any of the elegant arts, might be deducible from one or other of
those principles in the constitution of the human mind which are
here established and explained.

In executing this general plan, it was necessary first of all to
distinguish the imagination from our other faculties; and in the
next place to characterise those original forms or properties of
being, about which it is conversant, and which are by nature adapted
to it, as light is to the eyes, or truth to the understanding. These
properties Mr. Addison had reduced to the three general classes of
greatness, novelty, and beauty; and into these we may analyse every
object, however complex, which, properly speaking, is delightful to
the imagination. But such an object may also include many other
sources of pleasure; and its beauty, or novelty, or grandeur, will
make a stronger impression by reason of this concurrence. Besides
which, the imitative arts, especially poetry, owe much of their
effect to a similar exhibition of properties quite foreign to the
imagination, insomuch that in every line of the most applauded poems,
we meet with either ideas drawn from the external senses, or truths
discovered to the understanding, or illustrations of contrivance and
final causes, or, above all the rest, with circumstances proper to
awaken and engage the passions. It was, therefore, necessary to
enumerate and exemplify these different species of pleasure;
especially that from the passions, which, as it is supreme in the
noblest work of human genius, so being in some particulars not a
little surprising, gave an opportunity to enliven the didactic turn
of the poem, by introducing an allegory to account for the appearance.

After these parts of the subject which hold chiefly of admiration,
or naturally warm and interest the mind, a pleasure of a very
different nature, that which arises from ridicule, came next to be
considered. As this is the foundation of the comic manner in all the
arts, and has been but very imperfectly treated by moral writers, it
was thought proper to give it a particular illustration, and to
distinguish the general sources from which the ridicule of
characters is derived. Here, too, a change of style became necessary;
such a one as might yet be consistent, if possible, with the general
taste of composition in the serious parts of the subject: nor is it
an easy task to give any tolerable force to images of this kind,
without running either into the gigantic expressions of the mock
heroic, or the familiar and poetical raillery of professed satire;
neither of which would have been proper here.

The materials of all imitation being thus laid open, nothing now
remained but to illustrate some particular pleasures which arise
either from the relations of different objects one to another, or
from the nature of imitation itself. Of the first kind is that
various and complicated resemblance existing between several parts
of the material and immaterial worlds, which is the foundation of
metaphor and wit. As it seems in a great measure to depend on the
early association of our ideas, and as this habit of associating is
the source of many pleasures and pains in life, and on that account
bears a great share in the influence of poetry and the other arts,
it is therefore mentioned here, and its effects described. Then
follows a general account of the production of these elegant arts,
and of the secondary pleasure, as it is called, arising from the
resemblance of their imitations to the original appearances of nature.
After which, the work concludes with some reflections on the general
conduct of the powers of imagination, and on their natural and moral
usefulness in life.

Concerning the manner or turn of composition which prevails in this
piece, little can be said with propriety by the author. He had two
models; that ancient and simple one of the first Grecian poets, as
it is refined by Virgil in the Georgics, and the familiar epistolary
way of Horace. This latter has several advantages. It admits of a
greater variety of style; it more readily engages the generality of
readers, as partaking more of the air of conversation; and,
especially with the assistance of rhyme, leads to a closer and more
concise expression. Add to this the example of the most perfect of
modern poets, who has so happily applied this manner to the noblest
parts of philosophy, that the public taste is in a great measure
formed to it alone. Yet, after all, the subject before us, tending
almost constantly to admiration and enthusiasm, seemed rather to
demand a more open, pathetic, and figured style. This, too, appeared
more natural, as the author's aim was not so much to give formal
precepts, or enter into the way of direct argumentation, as, by
exhibiting the most engaging prospects of nature, to enlarge and
harmonise the imagination, and by that means insensibly dispose the
minds of men to a similar taste and habit of thinking in religion,
morals, and civil life. 'Tis on this account that he is so careful
to point out the benevolent intention of the Author of Nature in
every principle of the human constitution here insisted on; and also
to unite the moral excellencies of life in the same point of view
with the mere external objects of good taste; thus recommending them
in common to our natural propensity for admiring what is beautiful
and lovely. The same views have also led him to introduce some
sentiments which may perhaps be looked upon as not quite direct to
the subject; but since they bear an obvious relation to it, the
authority of Virgil, the faultless model of didactic poetry, will
best support him in this particular. For the sentiments themselves
he makes no apology.




BOOK I.


ARGUMENT.

The subject proposed. Difficulty of treating it poetically. The
ideas of the Divine Mind the origin of every quality pleasing to the
imagination. The natural variety of constitution in the minds of men;
with its final cause. The idea of a fine imagination, and the state
of the mind in the enjoyment of those pleasures which it affords.
All the primary pleasures of the imagination result from the
perception of greatness, or wonderfulness, or beauty in objects. The
pleasure from greatness, with its final cause. Pleasure from novelty
or wonderfulness, with its final cause. Pleasure from beauty, with
its final cause. The connexion of beauty with truth and good,
applied to the conduct of life. Invitation to the study of moral
philosophy. The different degrees of beauty in different species of
objects; colour, shape, natural concretes, vegetables, animals, the
mind. The sublime, the fair, the wonderful of the mind. The
connexion of the imagination and the moral faculty. Conclusion.

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