The Poetical Manuscripts of Mark Akenside in the Ralph M. Williams Collection, Amherst College Library. Reproduced in Facsimile. With an Introduction by Robin C. Dix.

Amherst, Massachusetts: Amherst College Press, 1988. Folio, paperbound (stiff blue printed wrappers), [29] pp. Near-Fine, with very slightly rubbed covers. From Introduction: The poetry of Mark Akenside (1721-1770) may not be widely read today, but in the eighteenth century and for much of the nineteenth his work was held in the very highest esteem, and writers as eminent as Wordsworth and Coleridge were considerably indebted to him...The Amherst Akenside holdings were originally mounted in Dyson’s own copy of the 1772 Poems, and together they form the largest single collection of his poetic manuscripts in the world...The manuscripts give the pieces [Ode to a Gentleman Whose Mistress Had Married an Old Man and Ode to a Gentleman in Hazard of Falling in Love] in a state quite different from that of the first printed texts...