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…
“The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think—rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men.”
Neighbourhood:
Enlightenment Poets, Georgian Poets, Nature Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Tenderness, Spirituality
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…
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Georgian Poets, Metaphysical Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Joy
