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Public domain poetry and public domain stories from the literary greats of yesteryear. |
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November 9, 1721 – June 23, 1770 Stories and Essay Listing Within this area you will be able to read, and give your thoughts on the poetry listed. Please, if you find an error, let me know. Read More About Mark Akenside below the list
About: Mark Akenside (November 9, 1721 – June 23, 1770), was an English poet and physician. Akenside was born at Newcastle upon Tyne, the son of a butcher; he was slightly lame all his life from a wound he received as a child from his father's cleaver. All his relations were dissenters, and, after attending the Royal Free Grammar School of Newcastle, and a dissenting academy in the town, he was sent (1739) to Edinburgh to study theology with a view to becoming a minister, his expenses being paid from a special fund set aside by the dissenting community for the education of their pastors. He had already contributed The Virtuoso, in imitation of Spenser's style and stanza (1737) to the Gentleman's Magazine, and in 1738 A British Philippic, occasioned by the Insults of the Spaniards, and the present Preparations for War (also published separately). After one winter as a theology student, he changed to medicine. He repaid the money that had been advanced for his theological studies, and became a deist. His politics, said Dr. Samuel Johnson, were characterized by an "impetuous eagerness to subvert and confound, with very little care what shall be established," and he is caricatured in the republican doctor of Tobias Smollett's Peregrine Pickle. He was elected a member of the Medical Society of Edinburgh in 1740. His ambitions already lay outside his profession, and his gifts as a speaker made him hope one day to enter Parliament. In 1740 he printed his "Ode on the Winter Solstice" in a small volume of poems. In 1741 he left Edinburgh for Newcastle and began to call himself surgeon, though it is doubtful whether he practised, and from the next year dates his life-long friendship with Jeremiah Dyson (1722-1776). During a visit to Morpeth in 1738, he had the idea for his didactic poem, The Pleasures of the Imagination, which was well received, and was subsequently translated into more than one foreign language. He had already acquired a considerable literary reputation when he came to London about the end of 1743 and offered the work to Robert Dodsley for £120. Dodsley thought the price exorbitant, and only accepted the terms after submitting the manuscript to Alexander Pope, who assured him that this was "no everyday writer." The three books of this poem appeared in January 1744. His aim, Akenside tells us in the preface, 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 harmonize 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." His powers fell short of this ambition; his imagination was not brilliant enough to surmount the difficulties inherent in a poem dealing so largely with abstractions; but the work was well received. Thomas Gray wrote to Thomas Warton that it was "above the middling," but "often obscure and unintelligible and too much infected with the Hutchinson jargon."
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