Mark Akenside was born on 9 November 1721 in Newcastle upon Tyne, and died in London on 23 June 1770. He was one of the most ambitious English poets of the mid-eighteenth century: a physician of substantial professional distinction, a political partisan, a learned student of philosophy and natural science, and the author of The Pleasures of Imagination, a poem that sought nothing less than to explain how the mind rec…
Compare Poets
Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.
Poet A
Mark Akenside
Poet B
James Beattie
Compare two related contemporaries
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 76%
Poems 83%
Blended 79%
Swap sides
Another related pair
James Beattie, born on 25 October 1735 and dead on 18 August 1803, occupied an unusual and revealing place in eighteenth-century British culture. He was at once a Scottish professor, a poet of landscape and sensibility, a popular moral philosopher, a Christian apologist, a music lover, a man of sociable ambition, and a bereaved father whose final years were darkened by illness and loss. In his own lifetime he was fam…
“Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.”
In time
Mark Akenside
James Beattie
1721
1803
They overlapped for 36 years (1735–1770).
When James Beattie was born, Mark Akenside was about 14.
James Beattie was about 35 when Mark Akenside died.
On the map
About 215 km separate Newcastle upon Tyne, England from Laurencekirk, Kincardineshire, Scotland. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Themes they return to
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Shared
Mark Akenside only
From the biographies
philosophical
eighteenth
Mark Akenside: newcastle upon tyne, the pleasures of imagination, robert dodsley, joseph addison, philip doddridge, blank verse, enlightenment, whig. James Beattie: laurencekirk, kincardineshire, the minstrel, original poems and translations, an essay on the nature and immutability of truth, samuel johnson, thomas gray, robert arbuthnot.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
The world around them
While their lives overlapped
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
Mark Akenside
James Beattie
Emotional landscapes
Mark Akenside: Longing, Tenderness, Joy. James Beattie: Sorrow, Tenderness, Spirituality.