English physician, classicist, and poet, one of the minor members of the Graveyard School, Akenside is best known for The Pleasures of Imagination, published in 1744. The poem was immensely popular, almost immediately going into a series of reprintings that would continue for a century and half. (The work was popular enough that Tobias Smollet would satirize Akenside in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle.) In the mid-1750s Akenside began (but did not complete) a revision of the poem, retitled The Pleasures of the Imagination — a decidedly unimaginative re-titling, it seems to me — but most critics prefer the original version.
Sites:
Mark Akenside
This discussion of Akenside's poetic achievement is from Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets (1779).
Biographical note
[1911 Encyclopedia]
Brief biographical note
[Columbia Encyclopedia, Bartleby]
Brief biographical note
[John W. Cousins, A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, 1910]
Brief biographical note
[Abacci Books]
Portraits
[National Portrait Gallery, London]
