Poetical Works of Akenside

This is an edition of the eighteenth-century English poet and physician, whose poetry has not been newly edited for more than a century and it will also clarify his role in the development of the aesthetic theories of his own generation and the one that followed. Mark Akenside was born at Newcastle upon Tyne on the 9th of November 1721. His family were Presbyterian Dissenters and on the 30th of that month he was baptized in the meeting then held in Hanover Square, by a Mr. Benjamin Bennet. His father Mark was a butcher in respectable circumstances his mother's name was Mary Lumsden. There may seem something grotesque in finding the author of the Pleasures of Imagination born in a place usually thought so anti poetical as a butcher's shop. And yet similar anomalies abound in the histories of men of genius.