Affliction’s Lonely Hour

Mark Akenside’s 1745 Odes on Several Subjects are wide ranging, though there is a particular through line of the poet’s physical and emotional health across the collection. His personal experience of illness echoed my own pains and gave them a language: ‘How thick the shades of evening close! […] While rouz’d by grief these fiery pains / Tear the frail texture of my veins’.3 It might seem strange to find comfort in the works of an eighteenth-century physician-poet who had tried and failed multiple times to set up a successful practice and was known for his harshness towards patients, but his poetic bedside manner was one that spoke to me while in the depths of solitary episodes of chronic illness flareups. Akenside came to national fame for his poetry by the age of 22, though he also held a strong desire to continue a medical career path. He received a grant from his local dissenting church to study for the ministry, but within a year of arriving at the University of Edinburgh he had switched to study medicine. On returning to Newcastle by early 1742, he spent time working on his The Pleasures of the Imagination. Akenside sold the manuscript to the prominent bookseller Robert Dodsley for £120, and it appeared anonymously on 16 January 1744, swiftly becoming one of the most popular philosophical poems of the century. Notably, presumably with the money he had received from Dodsley, Akenside then went to Leiden University to further his medical studies. This medical education fed directly into his poetry, with Akenside seeing poetry as a therapeutic tool that could be used to ease the pains of mind and body.