Selected Poetry

Three poets of sensibility, each highly esteemed and hugely influential in his time, are brought together in this single volume, the first representative selection to appear in many decades. Mark Akenside (1721-70) wrote "Pleasures of the Imagination", described by Dr Johnson as "an example of the great felicity of genius". James Macpherson (1736-96) wrote the alleged translations from the Gaelic of the poet Ossian, the seminal literary forgery of the century which agitated critics for generations after and helped popularise Celtic myth. Edward Young (1683-1765) remains the best-known of the three; his "Night Thoughts", published in the 1740s, were popular throughout Europe for a century and contributed, as did the work of the other two, to the rise of Romanticism.