Shown the manuscript of Mark Akenside's first major work, The Pleasures of Imagination (1744), Alexander Pope is said to have commented to the bookseller Robert Dodsley that this was "no every-day writer." Pope was generous to younger poets, but in this case he was encouraging Dodsley to publish what would become one of the more popular poems of the eighteenth century. Akenside was only twenty-two when it appeared, and The Pleasures of Imagination dominated the rest of his literary career; ten years after its first publication he began a rewriting and expansion of it that was still unfinished at his death. This long verse essay was his most important work; but his shorter poems are valuable both as experiments in form and theme in their own right and as part of a body of lyric poetry produced in the 1740s and 1750s, the period of Akenside's most concentrated poetic...