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
Yosa Buson
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.
Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 58%
Blended 58%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Yosa Buson, born in 1716 and dead on 17 January 1784, occupies a singular place in Japanese culture: he was at once one of the supreme masters of haiku, a major painter of the Edo period, an editor and teacher, a student of literary history, and a deliberate maker of artistic personae. Along with Matsuo Bashō and Kobayashi Issa, he is regularly named among the three greatest poets of the classical haiku tradition. Su…
“What you want to acquire, you should dare to acquire by any means. What you want to see, even though it is with difficulty, you should see. You should not let it pass, thinking there will be another chance.”
In time
Mark Akenside
Yosa Buson
1716
1784
They overlapped for 50 years (1721–1770).
When Mark Akenside was born, Yosa Buson was about 5.
Yosa Buson was about 54 when Mark Akenside died.
On the map
About 9,237 km separate Newcastle upon Tyne, England from Kema, Settsu Province, Japan. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
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
Mark Akenside: newcastle upon tyne, the pleasures of imagination, robert dodsley, joseph addison, philip doddridge, blank verse, enlightenment, whig. Yosa Buson: settsu province, kema, tokugawa shogunate, matsuo bashō, kobayashi issa, hayano hajin, bunjin, nanga.
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
Emotional landscapes
Mark Akenside: Longing, Tenderness, Joy. Yosa Buson: Peace, Joy, Tenderness.