Włoskie Rozkosze wyobraźni Josepha Addisona
The Italian Pleasures of Imagination by Joseph Addison

Summary/Abstract: This text touches on one the crucial problems of the rising English aesthetic thought and its relations with nature. It is an attempt to study the sources of this new way of man’s communing with the world that are present in Joseph Addison’s writings. Addison was thought to be one of the founders of this attitude. The starting point was a double aesthetic experience. In his Pleasures of Imagination Addison distinguishes its delights as “primary” and “secondary”. To simplify it, the experience of nature and art, while its proper object of analyses were Remarks on Several Parts of Italy published in 1705, a report from Addison’s Italian journey. This journey was his field of experience for his theory, and it ensured an insight into his own experience. This text attempts to examine the mutual relations and interdependencies between immediate experience of nature and Addison’s poetic experience. It attempts to show the meaning of this relation for his aesthetic categories: novelty, the sublime, and beauty and most of all for his concept of imagination.

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