ABSTRACT
Thomas Hollis had said that Mark Akenside was the modern poet most resembling that great "assertor of British liberty", and wrote that if, on sleeping in the bed, Akenside should feel himself moved to write an ode to the memory of its former owner, he would think himself abundantly recompensed. Responses to the poem were both positive and negative, and it is Akenside's misfortune that the negative views that survive were among the more authoritative. The Pythagorean translation of eternal harmonies into mundane forms - for which Akenside adapted the Shakespearean image - is retained, but is stated more cautiously. The patriotic claim is ambitious, and Akenside set himself the task of substantiating it in the light of recent psychological theory, of Addisonian doctrine on the imagination, and of Shaftesbury's alluring aesthetic scheme. The influence of Akenside's earlier Pleasures is apparent, as in the Ode on the Poetical Character.
