Barbara C Morden. The Life of Mark Akenside: The Breakthrough to Modernity

Abstract

Of particular delight in Barbara C. Morden’s latest book, The Life of Mark Akenside, are the frequent and often highly resonant Akensidean echoes detected in the works of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats. J. M. W. Turner’s paintings, too, carry palpable inflections of the Novocastrian poet’s night-sky verses and poetics of liberty. Anna Laetitia Barbauld was perhaps the most prominent advocate for Akenside’s talents, and this connection is meaningfully if briefly explored. Intriguingly, so I learned from Morden’s literary biography, Charles Lamb even coined the term ‘akensidise’ to denote a rejection of classical poetics; notwithstanding the persistence of classicism in Akenside’s practice, that askance angle presents tantalizing opportunities for further scholarly investigation into contemporary responses to his complex poetics. I also learned of Akenside Syndrome, a description of someone who denies their provincial origins, an unfortunate misnomer if we endorse Morden’s efforts in reclaiming Akenside as a proud Northerner. Even now an information board outside the Church of All Saints on Butchers Bank (also known as Akenside Hill) enshrines the persistent myth of the poet’s rejection of his natal home. Christopher Bucke, Akenside’s first biographer, seems to be the perpetrator of the myth, though he fixates on the poet’s apparent shame of his low birth as the son of a butcher rather than the large and culturally diverse region itself. This is not merely biographical detail. Such assumptions run counter to Akenside’s poetic identity. As he writes in ‘Ode on the Winter Solstice’: ‘Old Tyne shall listen to my tale, / And Echo, down the bord’ring vale, / The liquid melody prolong’.