Akenside's The Pleasures of Imagination: philosophic psychology and poetic aphasia.

Abstract

The Pleasures of Imagination by Mark Akenside has been traditionally considered a work of extended poetic incoherence. The purpose e of the following study is to find the cause of this incoherence and to explain its effect upon the poem. Since Akenside is at cross purposes in The Pleasures of Imagination, the resultant conflict is the reas on for the poem's amorphous features, for each purpose presupposes a view of nature different from and inimical to that of the other. Akenside's first purpose in wfiting The Pleasures of Imagination is didactic. He wishes to asseverate God's presence in the operations of . nature and in the lives, and sensations of man. This didactic intention presupposes the traditional objective, static view of nature which was still current in the cosmological thought of Akens ide's day, and he takes such thought as the source for his homiletic referents. Akenside's second purpose in writing the poem is to explore the pleasures of man's imagination, an intention influenced by Lockean associational psychology, which sees nature from the viewpoint of man's subjective and dynamic response to phenomena. The poetic result of Akenside's combining idealism and empirical exploration is structural amorphousness and incoherence. These are the consequences of his using Lockean associationism to guide his descriptive depiction of teleological truths. Samuel Johnson was the first critic to call attention to the desultory complexities of The Pleasures of Imagination, and his assessment of the poem has remained virtually unchallenged through the years. HoweverI some recent studies have attempted to find a basic structural device in The Pleasures of Imagination by caning it a dialectical argument. This study hopes to show that no such structure exists in the poem, that Akens ide never meant for such a structure to exist, and that Johns onIS initial evaluation of the poem is as timely now as it was when first printed. There are two printed versions of The Pleasures of Imagination. When reference is made to the poem, the first Roman numeral indicates the edition I the· second Roman numeral the book, and the Arabic numerals the respective line numbers.