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
Phillis Wheatley
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 57%
Poems 77%
Blended 66%
Swap sides
Another related pair
In the autumn of 1773, a slender volume of poetry emerged from a London printing house that would forever alter the landscape of American literature. "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral" bore the name of its author on the title page: Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston. This seemingly simple attribution concealed a profound paradox that would define both the poet's life and her…
“I, who was but a few years ago in the deplorable state of a poor African slave, am now numbered among the poets.”
In time
Mark Akenside
Phillis Wheatley
1721
1784
They overlapped for 18 years (1753–1770).
When Phillis Wheatley was born, Mark Akenside was about 32.
Phillis Wheatley was about 17 when Mark Akenside died.
On the map
About 4,769 km separate Newcastle upon Tyne, England from Senegal or Gambia, West Africa. 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. Phillis Wheatley: boston, west africa, john wheatley, susanna wheatley, george whitefield, to his excellency general washington, poems on various subjects, neoclassical verse.
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
Phillis Wheatley
1767
First Poem Published
Emotional landscapes
Mark Akenside: Longing, Tenderness, Joy. Phillis Wheatley: Spirituality, Wonder, Peace.