Philosophical Connections
Akenside, Neoclassicism, Romanticism

A unique account of the shifting cultures of poetry across the Age of Enlightenment.

Chris Townsend (Author)

9781009222976, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 19 May 2022

75 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 0.5 cm, 0.12 kg

Neoclassical and Romantic verse cultures are often assumed to sit in an oppositional relationship to one another, with the latter amounting to a hostile reaction against the former. But there are in fact a good deal of continuities between the two movements, ones that strike at the heart of the evolution of verse forms in the period. This Element proposes that the mid-eighteenth-century poet Mark Akenside, and his hugely influential Pleasures of Imagination, represent a case study in the deep connections between Neoclassicism and Romanticism. Akenside's poem offers a vital illustration of how verse was a rival to philosophy in the period, offering a new perspective on philosophic problems of appearance, or how the world 'seems to be'. What results from this is a poetic form of knowing: one that foregrounds feeling over fact, that connects Neoclassicism and Romanticism, and that Akenside called the imagination's 'pleasures'.

Introduction, or 'The Design'
1. Philosophic Backgrounds: Pope's Essay and Akenside
2. 'Appearances in the World Around Us': Akenside and the Way Things Seem to Be
3. 'There to read the transcript of Himself': Coleridge, Akenside, and the Esemplastic Imagination
4. Akenside's Romanticism: Wordsworth, Keats, and Imaginative Pleasures
Conclusion: Things Connected.

Subject Areas: History of Western philosophy [HPC], Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]