Theodicy at Midcentury: Young, Akenside, and Hume

Abstract

IT IS EMBLEMATIC of the difficulties in understanding mideighteenth-century English poetry and thought that two notable poetic theodicies should have appeared a scant decade after An Essay on Man, the one poem usually regarded by literary historians as a safe summation of period attitudes. Emblematic too, I believe, is the fact that these two answers to Pope in the 1740s, Young's Night Thoughts, the work of an Anglican divine in his sixties, and The Pleasures of Imagination, written by a suspiciously republican Deist in his early twenties, should at bottom have more in common with each other than either does with Pope's vindication of God's ways to man. The present essay is an attempt to make sense of these facts. Because putting the circumstances of the poems' construction in this light already involves several value judgments, I will begin by trying to justify reading Young's and Akenside's now faded poems as significant theodicies at all, before proceeding to examine their instructive similarities to each other and their shared differences from An Essay on Man. In the third and most speculative section of the discussion I will attempt to describe the difference between the poetic world of Pope and the blanker universe of Young and Akenside as analogous to the distance separating the philosophic procedures of Locke and Hume, whose central analytic work appeared first in 1739-40.