THE ASSOCIATIVE IMAGINATION AND DIVINE PASSIONS IN MARK AKENSIDE’S THE PLEASURES OF THE IMAGINATION (1744)
THE ASSOCIATIVE IMAGINATION AND DIVINE PASSIONS IN MARK AKENSIDE’S THE PLEASURES OF THE IMAGINATION (1744)

Summary/Abstract: Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744) demands the attention of intellectual and cultural historians, if only on account of its eclectic reconceptualization of the“creative” imagination. Here, the “poetic” imagination takes over a set of moral remedies formerly ascribed to the faculty only in psychological, medical or moral philosophical discussions – remedies which, moreover, undergo a series of developments due especially, but not exclusively, to Hume’s assignment of the process of association to the imagination and to emerging notions of ‘taste’. This paper argues that the ‘creative’ imagination thus conceived allows Akenside to define poetry as equally suitable, alongside science, for the cultivation of religious passions and virtues. Akenside’s main argument in this sense is that the cognitive and affective practices which are involved in the production of poetry (and which are guided by the imagination) allow the poet to discover and cultivate the ‘triggers’ of appropriate emotion and virtue which God has placed in nature. The poet thus gains access to privileged states of ‘raptur’d vision’ and comes to possess the affective make-up of divinity. I would like to shed light upon the ways in which, according to Akenside, the ‘creative’ imagination contributes to the cultivation of such ‘divine’ emotions and thus to highlight the moral and spiritual dimension of mid eighteenth-century notions about literary creation.

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