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This chapter locates Mark Akenside at a point where counter-materialist theology and poetic theory weirdly converge with speculative embryology. The poet and physician held that human beings break into a new category of existence as they advance to an immaterial state, but normal sexual reproduction extends material life as it is. According to Akenside’s MD dissertation, God and the mother do all the work in the latter process and sperm have no functional role to play. His poetry compensates for this picture of men alienated from reproductive futurity, the chapter argues, by assigning certain male poets a power that was often (and notoriously) seen as maternal: they can impress their imaginations on the bodies and minds of other people and so steer humanity toward a different kind of future. The chapter culminates in an extended comparison to Erasmus Darwin, another poet-physician trained in embryology and, as it happens, another rare theorist of the power of paternal impressions.

Beginning the final section of the book, which shows how early Romanticism tames the spiritualist impulse, this chapter considers poetic re-embodiment in relation to psychological depression, called “gloom” by the poet and critic Anna Letitia Barbauld. She faulted Edward Young for having popularized a dangerously gloomy sublimity that, by separating souls from bodies, desensitized readers to subtle and modest everyday feelings. As a remedy, her writing praises the enlightened “chearfulness” of Mark Akenside, a healthy middle register of embodied emotion that is neither too dark nor too bright. Yet Barbauld eventually came to agree, the chapter argues, with medical experts who had decided that melancholy is an affliction more of matter than mind. Late poems, crowned by Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), both accept that gloom belongs in the physical body and identify the poet’s own voice with that body. De-souled and dispirited, Barbauld at last domesticates Young’s otherworldly passion. She makes depression political by making it ordinary.

This chapter examines how Milton, celebrated as an epic poet, became a presiding muse of lyric poetry during a period when the generic category of lyric came to be expanded in scope and elevated in literary prestige. It argues for the formal and thematic influence of Milton’s companion-poems, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, as models for the eighteenth-century ‘great ode’. In particular, Milton’s concern with voluntary choice and eudaimonia in those poems was reborn in the eighteenth-century vogue for what might be called the poetry of health—a poetry concerned with the well-being of both body and mind, both poet and poetic tradition. The chapter traces that concern in the works of Anne Finch, John Pomfret, Thomas Parnell, Joseph Warton, William Collins, and Mark Akenside.