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Unit 11: Addison-Pleasures of Imagination ...

• “Brewer ranges over almost every corner of the English mind with sharp, darting Notes
observation…Brewer is perceptive, amusing and thorough wherever he strays. This is by far
the most complete and up-to-date account of the evolving Georgian arts…We are shown
round a society aiming at Rome but often hitting Babylon, with the combined attitudes of
‘fin-de-siècle’ Paris and of Las Vegas. This is a book to treasure as it treasures a past we
thought we had lost.” PAT ROGERS, ‘Sunday Telegraph’
• “A model of the new cultural history…In ‘Britons’, Linda Colley highlighted the new political,
patriotic and religious tides which flowed in the Georgian age, creating a fresh confidence
and sense of national identity…’The Pleasures of the Imagination’ confirms this view of the
making of the public mind. It shows how the English came to feel not just strong but civilized
too, polite as well as powerful. God’s chosen people, of the age of Cromwell, were reinventing
themselves as Shakespeare’s heirs.”
• Akenside got the idea for the poem during a visit to Morpeth in 1738.
• Addison assumes the teleological source of the pleasures of imagination is the Supreme
Creator.

11.8 Key-Words

1. Concept : General idea.
2. Symmetry : The quality of being made up of exactly similar parts facing each other or around
an axis.

11.9 Review Questions
1. Clarify Addison’s distinction among pleasures of the imagination, of sense, and of the
understanding. Which of these is the most refined and which the least refined?
2. Describe the salutary effects mentioned by Addison of the imaginative pleasures ultimately
arising from the perception of light and color.
3. What qualities of objects in the world does Addison discus which occasion the pleasures of the
imagination?
4. What two main kinds of beauty does Addison escribe and what is their origins?
5. What does he think is a final cause of æsthetic leasure? Why does he think the Supreme Being
created mankind with the capacity for experiencing pleasures of the imagination?
6. How does Addison relate the beauty of art to the beauty of nature? Why does he think the
artistic beauty inferior to that of nature even though natural beauty embodies æsthetic principles?
Answers: Self-Assessment
1. (i)(a) (ii)(c) (iii)(a)

11.10 Further Readings

1. Hugh Blair; Essays on the Pleasures of the Imagination, Joseph Addison, Duvera
EK and C. Antwerp.
2. Addison-pleasures of Imagination.

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