is why Akenside was such a natural editor for the project. Published from early 1746 to late 1747, the Museum was intended as a literary magazine, a “museum” as site of the muses. It generally declined simply to list rare things or curiosities, strange sights, and local exhibitions. There were other magazines that offered descriptions of strange and rare things in London, such as the long-running Gentleman’s Magazine.115 But the Museum was, right from the start, designed as an anthology of poetry, histories, literary reviews, and moral essays, intended from its inception as a compendium of concurrent tastes and a mirror of its age.116 It evinced a mainstream aesthetic, in which Dodsley’s implicit convictions about the parallel pursuits of poetry and collecting were repeatedly put on display. This is why it is called a “museum”—a collection that privileges literature and the arts. And, as the engraving on the title page suggests, it understands literature as the fruitful junction of inspiration and a messenger: Apollo, in his bower, is poised between Clio, the Muse of history, who will breathe her spirit into his ear, and the angel-like Hermes, ready to relay the poet’s song to Akenside’s list of subscribers.
After accepting Dodsley’s offer to manage the Museum, Akenside began calling himself its “Keeper,” modeling his task as specifically curatorial, perhaps even modeling himself after the Keepers of institutions like the Repository of the Royal Society. His own contributions to the magazine were addressed to a circle of like-minded collectors, not least in his numerous reviews of foreign and English books. He was, according to James Tierney, “consciously attempting to aid English collectors in the purchase of significant works for their libraries.”117 But editing a journal almost certainly suggested curating a collection because Akenside already thought of literary production and critical judgment as activities of his own deeply curatorial intellect. Akenside was in many ways defined by the powers of his memory. He was well known for “a memory of extraordinary power, and perfect readiness in the application of its stores.”118 Indeed, writes his first biographer, his memory “was at once discriminative and comprehensive.” He was said to have “retained all the riches of art, science, and history, legislation, poetry, and philosophy; and those he would draw out and embody to suit the occasion.”119 In this vein, Akenside was admired as a poet for his ability to return ideas to sense—drawing them out and “embodying” them; his memory was the source of his chief effects as a poet. Samuel Johnson, for instance, insisted that if “Akenside was a superiour poet both to Gray and Mason,” it is because of his “uncommon amplitude of acquisitions, [his] young mind stored with images, and much exercised in combining and comparing them.”120 Thomas Campbell admired Akenside’s “skill” in “delineating the processes of memory and association,” and the “animated view” he gives of “Genius collecting her stores for works of excellence.”121 “If little invention is exhibited,” Alexander Dyce would later aver of Akenside’s poetry, “the taste and skill with which the author has selected and combined his materials are everywhere conspicuous.”122 Akenside was less admired, in other words, as a poet of inspiration, though this has often been claimed by succeeding generations, than he was admitted to be an able conservator of his imaginative resources, effective at fleshing concepts out, “embodying” them in images.
Among Locke’s list of the metaphors which remind us that abstracts may be traced to embodied experiences (“imagine, apprehend, comprehend, conceive …”), “imagine” emerges as a special category. The organization or manipulation of images is in Locke’s system the basic instrument of the intellect. The imagination is the stage where sensible ideas are liberated, by way of the word, into concepts. It is where the “transfer” occurs, for it is where sensory perceptions of material things are handed over to the work of the understanding. It is the stage where metaphor is made possible, where sensory rudiments are witnessed by the mind and sublimated into ideas.123 But there is another way, in poetic practice, in which imagination emerges as the antonym for metaphor understood as abstraction, for “imagination” is more generally understood as the faculty that summons up images in service of the concepts they are made to represent. This is what Akenside and his contemporaries called “embodiment”: the idea is “embodied” in an image. Imagination in this sense denotes the reverse work of metaphor, providing a return road to sensory experience; it for this very reason suggests a set of rules and practices for poetry and the arts, a way of imagining expression as the distribution of images in service of a pattern or design. It is this reverse vector that made Locke, despite his distrust of fancy, an important figure to poets and painters of the Augustan mode. Locke’s Essay links a wide range of practicing poets, painters, authors, and artists of all sorts, each of whom differently agreed that the materials of sense are, in the end, the stuff of creative expression.
Akenside’s longest poems, what he called his epics, draw directly from the empiricist tradition elaborated by Milton, Locke, Pope, and, most important, Joseph Addison (Exhibits 12 and 13). Aside from standing next to Addison on the library shelf, Akenside’s inheritance is signaled by the titles of his two longest, best-known compositions: The Pleasures of Imagination (1745) and its recast version with the slightly altered title, The Pleasures of the Imagination (1772). Each differently owes intellectual debts to Addison’s 1712 Spectator essays of the same name—so much so that Akenside, despite explicit homage, was more than once accused of plagiarizing details from Addison’s essay.124 But it would be hard to know how else Akenside might proceed—for Akenside was all along a poet who thought of himself as an able curator of images, who worked by fleshing out ideas. The nineteenth-century critic John Aikin remarks that, if Akenside was “an original writer,” he “merit[s]” that title “by the expansion of the plan” of Addison’s “Pleasures of the Imagination,” “and by enriching its illustrations from the stores of philosophy and poetry.”125 Indeed, in this sense, Akenside extends a principle of borrowing that, we will see, was a keynote of Addison’s poetics; as Addison remarked, and as Akenside exemplified, “Wit and fine Writing doth not consist so much in advancing things that are new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable Turn.”126 Akenside was working with and through a theory of imagination as a curatorial function—the imagination as collecting in order to recollect objects of sense.127 Take, for instance, the clearest exposition of what, exactly, the imagination is, from his Pleasures of the Imagination:
For to the brutes
Perception and the transient boons of sense
Hath fate imparted: but to man alone
Of sublunary beings was it given
Each fleeting impulse on the sensual powers
At leisure to review; with equal eye
To scan the passion of the stricken nerve
Or the vague object striking: to conduct
From sense, the portal turbulent and loud,
Into the mind’s wide palace one by one
The frequent, pressing, fluctuating forms,
And question and compare them.128
At the moment that he theorizes the imagination as a storehouse of ideas, and the human act of aesthetic appreciation (and judgment) as an imaginative act of “review,” Akenside recalls from his resources a material metaphor to realize it. This is the basic pattern of his poem. His basic move is to “imagine” abstracts, a habit that at times develops a metronomic regularity. It is perhaps fair to say that his thoughts on the imagination remain hopelessly abstract until he lights upon the “palace” as a visual or spatial metaphor to recollect his argument, returning the abstract idea to its material rudiments.129 The form Akenside chooses—the mind as palace—is a conventional one, husbanded perhaps from Locke’s “presence room” (see Exhibit 1),
