THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Imagination) is, despite its title, more an essay in poetic grandiloquence than a persuasive discourse on creative
visualization. Akenside (1721-70), a physician by profession, is at his best when he writes with restraint. His
nocturnal ode ‘To the Evening-Star’ (published posthumously in 1772), though larded with classical epithet and
allusion, has a certain elegant regularity and self conscious serenity, qualities evident too in his modestly learned
‘retirement’ poem ‘Inscription for a Grotto’ (1758). The Pleasures of Imagination is a lengthy, discursive, and often
rhapsodic celebration of the imaginative faculty. It moralizes more than it defines and it delights more in the
‘complicated joy’ derived from the contemplation of grandeur than it really attempts to unravel imaginative
complexity. It parallels the philosophy of An Essay on Criticism and the inclusiveness of The Seasons, but it lacks the
poetry of both. Nevertheless, the poem contains passages of real clarity and steady invention, notably in its excursion
in the third book in which Akenside attempts to expound a series of ideas associated with poetic creation (lines 312-
436) and when, in his fragmentary fourth book, he dwells nostalgically on his early memories of the valley of the
Tyne ‘when all alone, for many a summer’s day | I wandered through your calm recesses, led | In silence by some
powerful hand unseen’.
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Other Pleasures of Imagination: Dennis, Addison, and Steele
The older critic, John Dennis (1657-1734), proved to be one of the prime irritants to Alexander Pope’s spleen. In An
Essay on Criticism Pope had generally alluded to ‘Some [who] have at first for Wits then Poets past, | Turn’d Criticks
next, and prov’d plain Fools at last’, and had, more specifically, insulted Dennis under the name of Appius (one of
the characters in his recent dramatic flop Appius and Virginia). Not one to take such comments placidly, Dennis
replied with the equally provocative, but more unpleasantly personal, Critical and Satirical Reflections upon a late
Rhapsody call’d, An essay upon Criticism. Pope took further revenge by adding a note to his own poem referring to ‘a
furious old Critic by profession, who upon no other provocation, wrote against this Essay and its author, in a manner
perfectly lunatic’. The feud continued up to the time of the revised Dunciad. Such vituperative, tit-for-tat critical
sparring was not untypical of the period. Regardless of Pope’s venom, and despite serious temporary fluctuations in
his reputation, Dennis the critic, if not Dennis the poet and dramatist, has remained modestly influential. He wrote
with a blithe confidence in his own cleverness and in the correctness of the strict neo-classical principles he had
espoused, but much of the continuing interest in his work lies in its novel concern with the nature of the Sublime
(though Pope mocked his overuse of the word ‘tremendous’). His essays on poetry, notably The Advancement and
Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701) and The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), offer analyses of the processes
of poetic creation and explore the idea of a creativity based in passion and emotion. Although Dennis insists that
‘there is nothing in Nature that is great and beautiful without Rule and Order’ he also speaks of the inspirational
quality of ‘delightful Horrour’ and ‘terrible Joy’ and remarks that ‘if the chief Thing in Poetry be Passion, why then,
the chief Thing in great Poetry must be great Passion’. He was a convinced admirer of Milton and was one of the
earliest writers to attempt a detailed, critical analysis of Paradise Lost. The Three Letters on the Genius and Writings
of Shakespeare (1711) offer a more stilted, erratic, even blinkered, view of an admired poet. He is happy to attack the
anomalies and the historical inconsistencies in Shakespeare’s plays, and he is perturbed by what he sees as
deficiencies in their ‘design’, but he none the less responds enthusiastically to the ‘raising of terror’ in the tragedies.
To Dennis’s younger contemporary, Joseph Addison (1672-1719), writing in one of a series of essays on ‘the
Pleasures of the Imagination’ published in The Spectator in the summer of 1712, Shakespeare’s ‘noble extravagance
of fancy’ thoroughly qualified him to touch the ‘weak superstitious part of his reader’s imagination’. Addison’s
criticism shows him to be fascinated by the ‘very odd turn of thought required’ for what Dryden had earlier styled ‘the
fairy way of writing’, the delineation of imaginary or supernatural beings. Although he
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classes ‘the pleasures of the imagination’ at a mid-point between the grosser ‘pleasures of sense’ and the refined
‘pleasures of the understanding’, he insists that his contemporaries should begin to question neo-classical critical
prejudices and grant precedence to the workings of the imagination in the writer and the reader alike. He allows, for
example, that the complementary insights of Newton and Locke had altered modern perceptions of the relationship
between the observed object and the apprehension of the imagination. With Dennis, Addison grants that greatness in
nature inspires greatness in art, but he goes on to suggest that though ‘the works of Nature [are] more pleasant to the
imagination than those of art’ they are ‘still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of art’ and that, conversely,
works of art are more pleasant ‘the more they resemble those of Nature’. These interrelationships, Addison implies,