Odes Subjects, Signed (1 results)

Two works stitched together, but disbound from a volume; 4to, pp. 54; 26, [2] advertisements; a little foxed towards the end; disbound. First editions of both works. Odes on Several Subjects is Akenside's most important publication, after his enormously popular Pleasures of Imagination, which had first appeared the year before. Akenside published almost all of his poetry when he was very young, devoting the rest of his life to his career as a physician. He was an ardent Whig, in both political and religious terms, which did not endear him to Samuel Johnson, whose appraisal of him in his Lives of the Poets is dismissive: 'Of his odes nothing favourable can be said. To examine such compositions singly, cannot be required; they have doubtless brighter and darker parts: but when they are once found to be generally dull, all further labour may be spared; for to what use can the work be criticized that will not be read?' Posterity has dealt with Akenside more generously; he was an acknowledged influence on both Wordsworth and Coleridge. As Iolo Williams first noticed, signature B of this collection of poems was at first wrongly imposed, so that the text on p. 10 (B1 verso) was originally that which belonged on p. 52; a few copies survive in that state. In this copy, the whole of sig. B has been reprinted; an intermediate state exists in which B1 is a cancel. The Ode to the Earl of Huntingdon is also known in two different states, although in this case one appears to be largely a reprint of the other, with part of sig. B reprinted from standing type. Foxon places this one (with 'Pall-mall' in the imprint, and A3 signed 'A2') first, but in Points Williams is of the contrary opinion. Foxon p. 13 and A137; Williams, Seven XVIIIth century bibliographies, pp. 90-92; and Points in eighteenth-century verse, pp. 45-6.