{"id":22,"date":"2013-05-25T22:01:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-25T21:01:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2023-11-13T04:42:28","modified_gmt":"2023-11-13T04:42:28","slug":"mark-akenside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/sonnetsonpoets\/2013\/05\/25\/mark-akenside\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Akenside"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Akenside<\/b>.
\n(Born at Newcastle-on-Tyne, November 9th, 1721;<\/i><\/p>\n

\n<\/a><\/i><\/div>\n

\nDied in London, June 23rd, 1770.)<\/i>
\n
<\/i>
\nImagination need not stretch her wings
\nTo flee away from Reason\u2019s stern control,
\nTo feel how AKENSIDE can lead the soul
\nTo highest tastes: for he o\u2019er all things flings
\nNo wicked glamour; but he nobly sings 5
\nIn classic strains of purest po\u00ebsy,
\nAll that can cherish truest liberty.
\nSeems it as though some Greek had struck the strings
\nOf AKENSIDE\u2019s sweet lyre. We feel to rove
\nWith Pericles or Plato hand in hand. 10
\nWould every poet took as true a stand,
\nAnd show\u2019d as wise and energetic love
\nOf all that\u2019s pure and fit for bard to sing,\u2014
\nThen Earth would cease her constant sorrowing.<\/p>\n

George Markham Tweddell<\/b>
\n
<\/b>
\nMark Akenside (9 November 1721 \u2013 23 June 1770) was an English poet and physician. Akenside was born at Newcastle upon Tyne, England, 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 in 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). 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 The Adventures of 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 lifelong friendship with Jeremiah Dyson (1722\u20131776). During a visit to Morpeth in 1738, Akenside had the idea for his didactic poem, The Pleasures of the Imagination, which was well received and later desecribed as ‘of great beauty in its richness of description and language’, and was also 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 \u00a3120. 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”. Read more here <\/b>http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mark_Akenside<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Akenside. (Born at Newcastle-on-Tyne, November 9th, 1721; Died in London, June 23rd, 1770.) Imagination need not stretch her wings To flee away from Reason\u2019s stern control, To feel how AKENSIDE can lead the soul To highest tastes: for he o\u2019er all things flings No wicked glamour; but he nobly sings 5 In classic strains […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":73,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/sonnetsonpoets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/sonnetsonpoets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/sonnetsonpoets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/sonnetsonpoets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/sonnetsonpoets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/sonnetsonpoets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/sonnetsonpoets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions\/74"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/sonnetsonpoets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/sonnetsonpoets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/sonnetsonpoets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsrainbow.com\/sonnetsonpoets\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}