The Pleasures of the Imagination is a long didactic poem by Mark Akenside, first published in 1744.
The first book defines the powers of imagination and discusses the various kinds of pleasure to be derived from the perception of beauty; the second distinguishes works of imagination from philosophy; the third describes the pleasure to be found in the study of man, the sources of ridicule, the operations of the mind, in producing works of imagination, and the influence of imagination on morals. The ideas were largely borrowed from Joseph Addison's essays on the imagination and from Lord Shaftesbury. Edward Dowden complains that "his tone is too high-pitched; his ideas are too much in the air; they do not nourish themselves in the common heart, the common life of man." Samuel Johnson praised the blank verse of the poems, but found fault with the long and complicated periods.
It is presumably to relieve this tension that Burke recasts Addison's distinction between primary and secondary pleasures of the imagination as a distinction between “the primary pleasures of sense” and “the secondary pleasures of the imagination” (Burke 1990, 22).
Although Addison maintains that the pleasures of taste are pleasures of the imagination, his explanations as to why certain objects of imagination please are not particularly materialist: he traces the pleasure we take in “an unbounded view,” for example, to our regarding it as “an image of liberty” (Addison and Steele 1879, no. 412).
This pleasure combines with the pleasure attending the emotion that awakens the train, and with the pleasures attending the emotions that arise from the ideas constituting the train, to form the complex pleasures attending the complex emotions of taste, namely, the emotions of beauty and of sublimity.
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