Mark Akenside
Personal Information
Description
An English physician and poet (Wikipedia).
Books
Opera omnia
Selected poetry
This varied and far-ranging volume contains a substantial selection from the work of one of our most distinguished poets. From his first book, A Crackling of Thorns, chosen by W.H. Auden as the 1958 volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, to his most recent, Harp Lake (1988), Selected Poetry provides an overview of the brilliant career in poetry celebrated by John Hollander's appointment as a MacArthur Fellow. It includes work from eleven volumes, almost all out of print, and is published simultaneously with a new collection, Tesserae and Other Poems. Harold Bloom has said of Hollander's last book, "It confirms his authentic eminence, comparable in my judgment to that of Merrill, Ashbery, Ammons and only a few others in his own generation of American poets." Selected Poetry replaces an earlier volume, Spectral Emanations, New and Selected Poems, published in 1978 and now out of print.
Poems
The Pleasures of Imagination
The Pleasures of Imagination was first published in 1744: many editions followed, continuing to appear long after Akenside's death in 1771. The poem was to exercise a significant influence both upon Coleridge's thinking at an especially formative period, and upon Wordsworth's style as he began the prelude in 1798. This reissue of 1795 is introduced by the Unitarian poet Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Coleridge's predecessor as a follower of Joseph Priestly.