Strange Paths of Knowledge: Madness and Radicalism in Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno and

other religious poems

Proposed aim of the thesis

G.S. Rousseau, writing about the eighteenth century ‘wave of

interest in lunacy’, not only among medical practitioners, but also among

writers and artists, comments that he had noted in 1969 the ironic contrast

that the supposed ‘Age of Reason’ should have produced so many cases of

insanity among its writers, but he did not realize ‘how very ironic it was’

until he revised his article for Pat Rogers’s Augustan Vision in 19741. Pat

Rogers in his Introduction observes that though the nature and causes of

insanity in different men such as William Collins, Christopher Smart and

William Cowper were very different -- ‘that is not sufficient for saying that

the causes are wholly unconnected.’2 It may even be said that many poets

and artists in the Augustan era who felt estranged or bereft from the social

order, sought refuge in madness. In the case of Christopher Smart the

alienation was doubly bitter as he was essentially seen as a religious poet

1 See ‘Science and the discovery of the imagination in enlightened England’ (1969) and ‘Name of Article’ by G. S. Rousseau (1974).

2 See Introduction to Augustan Vision, ed. Pat Rogers (1974), p.

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during his madness, in a social order which held both religion and poetic

imagination as liable to play havoc with Reason.

Recent critical opinion on Christopher Smart, following John Butt, is

keen to establish him as ‘the most astonishing hymn writer of the century’,

especially because they were written, along with his masterpiece Jubilate

Agno ‘towards the end of his life, certainly no earlier than 1759 or 1760,

when he was suffering physical restraints for madness real or supposed.’3

Donald Davie has even argued that ‘It is not impossible that when Smart is

judged over the whole range of his vicarious production … he will be

thought of as the greatest English poet between Pope and Wordsworth.’4

Based on this changing perception of Christopher Smart as a minor

eighteenth century neo classical or pre-Romantic poet to a representative

example of the poet othered by the Age of Reason, my thesis will look for

connections between the history of Smart’s purported madness and his

religious and political beliefs in the context of eighteenth century radicalism

as an important, but neglected perspective in rereading Jubilate Agno and

3

4

2

the other religious poems that Smart wrote in his last years. References will

be made to the whole range of his earlier production as and when required.

Argument and methodology

My thesis is based primarily on a reading of Christpher Smart’s

religious poems written during asylum confinement – Jubilate Agno and A

Song to David. But as it traverses the terrains of history and literature, the

discourse of religion and radicalism in Smart’s poetry of madness is sought

to be understood in relation to other works (both poetical and non

poetical) written by Smart and his contemporary writers of the eighteenth

century. This kind of attempt is in accordance with the methods proposed

by theorists of New Historicism like Michel Foucault, Haydon White,

Stephen Greenblatt, Catherine Belsey and others, who insist on paying

special attention to the textuality of history and the historical specificity of

literary texts. It will also incorporate methods of reading literary texts that

are currently available in Cultural and Gender Studies.

3

To my mind, this focus on Christopher Smart is urgently needed

because he was a satirist, a political journalist and a man of transsexual

capabilities, even though he has gone down in history as a religious poet.

Foucault’s writings on madness and sexuality, as well as gender theory

pertaining to Queer Studies, can be helpful in understanding the relation

between Smart’s radicalism and his cross dressing as Mrs. Mary Midnight to

make the most outrageous double entendres about government policy and

dominant social trends – a perspective that also throws light on the

nuanced style of his densely allusive poetry written in confinement. Again,

remembering that Smart’s support was extended to a working class woman

poet like Mary Leapor who gratefully acknowledged it, and the words of

encouragement underlying Smart’s scarcely veiled address to Hannah More

(who functioned as the centre of inspiration for the evangelical crusades

called the Clapham sect) in his Oratorio Sympathy for Hannah, it is possible

to capture some resonances in Smart’s religious poetry of his lifelong

sympathy for the woman’s cause (representing two different and

apparently irreconcilable class interests) as well as for the cause of the

working classes in particular. But Smart has usually been accused of

sycophancy towards members of aristocratic families at different points in

4

his life – somewhat unjustly, as Chris Mounsey suggests – because he often

had to depend on the pittance of wealthy benefactors, particularly in the

last years of his life when he could no longer make a living out of his

writings. The beat generation radical poet Allan Ginsberg’s fascination for

the leitmotif of the Cat in Jubilate Agno as the best of all God’s creatures,

read along with Robert Darnton’s essay “Worker’s Revolt: the Great Cat

Massacre of Rue Saint Severon” which narrates the event of a printing-

press workers’ revolt in eighteenth century France by killing and mutilating

the black cat adored by the press owner’s wife5, may bring out certain

tropes embedded in the common critical discourse of the English and

French revolutions to which Champion alludes. This is especially relevant

because Smart asserted that he was writing ‘Jubilate Agno’ to ‘defend the

philosophy of scripture against vain deceit’, being ‘inquisitive of the Lord’

and wanting to speak out for the right of all animals to pray to God in their

own ways.

The special contribution of this research

5 See Robert Darnton,

5

While early scholars like Lawrence Binyon and Geoffrey Grigson had

represented Smart as ‘a case of fascinating interest’ -- ‘doubly mysterious’

because of his madness6, recent scholars and biographers7 of Smart have

tried to focus on his modernity, observing that his work has had a great

impact on modernist poets like Edith Sitwell, Alan Ginsberg, Theodore

Roethke, Peter Porter and others. Smart’s modernity appears particularly

strange in his last poems, ‘Song to David’ and ‘Jubilate Agno,’ written during

his confinement because they are so strikingly different from his previous

poems8. One of the thrusts of my thesis is to focus on this difference which

has not yet been adequately analyzed.

Smart’s poetry has invited new assessments also because the first complete

edition of his poems appeared many years after his death, in fact, in the

1980s. The manuscript of the poem ‘Jubilate Agno’, for which Smart is now

most acclaimed, was only discovered in the twentieth century (1939),

edited and published by W. F. Stead. Some of his works, as his recent

editors Marcus Walsh and Karina Williamson observe, had not been

6 See Binyon, , p. and Grigson, p.

7 For example the works of listed in the bibliography

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reprinted since they were published in his lifetime. Eighteenth and

nineteenth century collections of Smart’s poetry represented only a

fraction of his total output, deliberately omitting ‘a Song to David’ and all of

his later poetry. As a result Smart, like the other eighteenth century radical

poet Burns, was hardly recognized for his best poems until the twentieth

century.9 Of the twentieth century collections, Robert Brittain’s edition

(Princeton University Press, 1950) only prints a selection of his poems

although it is outstanding for its critical and editorial matter. The five

volume edition by Marcus Walsh and Karina Williamson from the Clarendon

Press, Oxford, was published in the 1980s making all of Smart’s poems,

especially his hymns and other religious poetry, available together for the

first time. But even this edition acknowledges its inability/unwillingness to

go deep into the occult meanings or private systems of signification in

Smart’s poetry and Jubilate Agno in particular.10 My thesis can help to fill in

the gap in editorial and critical discussions of Smart’s radicalism, without

which the full signification of his religious poetry, or its ‘rhetoric of mania’

that Clement Hawes discusses as the secret of Smart’s unique style, cannot

be unraveled.

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INTRODUCTION

Smart is a typical minor poet of an uninteresting age.

Cyril Falls

Christopher Smart’s literary career and his reputation as a religious poet

Christopher Smart is usually regarded as a minor poet of the eighteenth century. While

Pope remained a formidable influence on Smart and other late eighteenth century

poets, Smart’s contemporaries like William Collins, Thomas Gray, William Cowper and

even Oliver Goldsmith are better known and more frequently anthologized than him.

Smart’s poetry, moreover, is too allusive, eclectic and eccentric to be comfortably

classified as pre-romantic, although in his last and best poems Smart had come a long

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way from the classicism of his early works. Does Smart, then, deserve the obscurity

which makes his poetry so unfamiliar to the student of English literature?

W.H. Auden, in the Introduction/Preface (?) to his edited anthology Nineteenth Century

Minor Poets, defined the minor poet as one who cannot measure up to all the

conditions that a poet needs to fulfill in order to qualify as a major poet. These are that:

1. He must write a lot.

2. His poems must show a wide range of subject matter and treatment.

3. He must exhibit an unmistakable originality of vision and style.

4. He must be a master of verse technique.

5. He must show a process of maturing which continues until he dies, so the

reader can differentiate between poems written at the early stage and

poems written later.

If we consider Auden’s list as a valid set of criteria it will be obvious why Smart was

never placed in the category of major poets. Very few of his early writings are

remarkable for their originality. He was not noted for a prolific output of poetry in the

sane years of his life. And he rose to his greatest poetry, as he claimed, by a sudden

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spiritual conversion rather than by gradually acquiring maturity in thought or technical

skill. But interestingly, Auden himself was a great admirer of Christopher Smart. He

quoted lines from Jubilate Agno soon after its publication in the notes to the first edition

of his book New Year Letter (1941), even though Auden’s ‘own poetry bears no imprint

of Smart’. (Williamson, Enlightenment, p. 240)

As a Cambridge university scholar Smart had gained acclaim for his brilliant Latin verses

and imitation of classical forms, and among the literati of his time Smart’s fame rested

on his skills as a writer of odes and satires in which he continued to follow the

neoclassical styles of Dryden and Pope until well after the emergence of a pre-romantic

aesthetic in the eighteenth century. Smart’s first ‘original’ poem, in which he ventured

into the ‘sublime’ mode, was "Ode for Musick on St. Cecilia's Day." His most ambitious

work, The Hop Garden, published in his first volume of poetry called Poems on Several

Occasions (year), was a georgic in two books running to well over seven hundred lines of

Miltonic blank verse. ‘A conspicuous feature of the poem is its mixture of styles, ranging

from polysyllabic Latinate coinages and Spenserian archaisms to blunt colloquialisms,’

writes who (Karina Williamson)? Though this particular poem attracted some attention

for its wit and realism, an anonymous writer in The General Review (1752) pointed out

that Smart would have earned more credit by reprinting his poems On the Eternity of

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the Supreme Being (1750) and On the Immensity of the Supreme Being (1751). This

might suggest that Smart was recognised as a promising writer of religious poetry even

before his recorded experience of spiritual conversion. Karina Williamson, the Oxford

editor of Smart’s Jubilate Agno/Religious poems, remarks:

The reviewer's judgment was shrewd. These poems were the first and

second of Smart's five Cambridge prize poems, published between 1750 and

1755, which later-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century opinion

rated the peak of his achievement; this assessment was reflected in the

frequency with which they were quoted from and reprinted.

In Smart’s own time his poems mainly appeared in journals like New Ballad, Ladies

Magazine, Universal Magazine, Midwife and so on. His best known satire, The Hilliad

(1753), intended to discredit Hill who was Smart's enemy in the paper war between Hill

and Henry Fielding, is too full of topical allusions to be appreciated today. Between

1750 and 1755 Smart wrote five devotional poems which regularly won him the

Seatonian prize for religious/devotional poetry as a Cambridge scholar every year. These

were On the Eternity of the Supreme Being (1750), On the Immensity of the Supreme

Being (1751), On the Omniscience of the Supreme Being (1752), On the Power of the

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Supreme Being (1754) and On the Goodness of the Supreme Being (1756). Chris

Mounsey suggests that he wrote these poems and offered them for the Seatonian prize

on the advice of his well wishers so that he could be assured of a fixed income every

year. Nevertheless, he seems to have disappeared from the London literary scene in

1853 and for the next two years during which he faced a lot of retaliation for his political

involvement as a Grub Street writer, in which he also suffered a permanent setback

during these years.

In 1756 Smart had the most acute attack of a dangerous illness that had been assailing

him for some time, and his recovery from it was a turning point in Smart's life which he

commemorated with a Hymn to the Supreme Being, on Recovery from a dangerous Fit of

Illness (1756). The tone and approach to adoration of God’s goodness is quite different

in this poem than in the more academic poem celebrating the same idea which Smart

had written shortly before he came to write the Hymn. In his last Seatonian poem On

the Goodness of the Supreme Being Smart begins with a formal invocation to David, the

biblical writer of Psalms who was hailed by British classicists as the Orpheus of Israel,

asking to be inspired by David’s ‘divinest skill’ to give ‘voice and sound’ to the muse for

praising ‘Her God on earth, as he is prais’d in heaven.’

12

ORPHEUS, for so the Gentiles call'd thy name,

Israel's sweet psalmist, who alone could wake

Th' inanimate to motion; who alone

The joyful hillocks, the applauding rocks,

And floods with musical persuasion drew;

Thou, who to hail and snow gav'st voice and sound,

And mad'st the mute melodious!—greater yet

Was thy divinest skill, and rul'd o'er more

Than art or nature; for thy tuneful touch

Drove trembling Satan from the heart of Saul,

And quell'd the evil Angel:—in this breast

Some portion of thy genuine spirit breathe,

And lift me from myself; each thought impure

Banish; each low idea raise, refine,

Enlarge, and sanctify;—so shall the muse

Above the stars aspire, and aim to praise

Her God on earth, as he is prais'd in heaven.

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Smart’s identification with David is complete in the more personal voice of the Hymn

which marvels at the fact of sharing the blessings of the same miracle by which ‘Israel’s

ruler’ was restored to health after a mortal illness.

WHEN Israel's ruler on the royal bed

In anguish and in perturbation lay,

The down reliev'd not his anointed head,

And rest gave place to horror and dismay.

Fast flow'd the tears, high heav'd each gasping sigh

When God's own prophet thunder'd—MONARCH, THOU MUST DIE.

'And must I go,' th' illustrious mourner cry'd,

'I who have serv'd thee still in faith and truth,

Whose snow-white conscience no foul crime has died

From youth to manhood, infancy to youth,

Like David, who have still rever'd thy word

The sovereign of myself and servant of the Lord!'

The judge Almighty heard his suppliant's moan,

Repealed his sentence, and his health restor'd,

The beams of mercy on his temples shone,

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Shot from that heaven to which his sighs had soar'd,

The Sun retreated at his maker's nod

And miracles confirm the genuine work of God.

It has been observed that in Smart’s case it was a mental illness from which he had very

little hope of return, as suggested in the following lines, with their repeated reference to

his ‘follies’ and loss of reason or sense:

But, O immortals! What had I to plead

When death stood o'er me with his threat'ning lance,

When reason left me in the time of need,

And sense was lost in terror or in trance,

My sick'ning soul was with my blood inflam'd,

And the celestial image sunk, defac'd and maim'd.

I sent back memory, m heedful guise,

To search the records of preceding years;

Home, like the raven to the ark, she flies,

Croaking bad tidings to my trembling ears.

O Sun, again that thy retreat was made,

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And threw my follies back into the friendly shade!

But who are they, that bid affliction cease!—

Redemption and forgiveness, heavenly sounds!

Yet in these lines Smart also suggests that he fails to see himself as worthy of such a

miracle and cannot explain it as anything other than the grace of Christ. With a graphic

description of how life and the desire to live seeped into his veins little by little Smart

resolves to consecrate this life to singing the praise of God:

In man humility's alone sublime,

Who diffidently hopes he's Christ's own care—

O all-sufficient Lamb! in death's dread hour

Thy merits who shall slight, or who can doubt thy power?

But soul-rejoicing health again returns,

The blood meanders gentle in each vein,

The lamp of life renew'd with vigour burns,

And exil'd reason takes her seat again—

Brisk leaps the heart, the mind's at large once more,

To love, to praise, to bless, to wonder and adore.

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Having been granted this ‘second birth’ by one ‘Whose powr's uncircumscrib'd, whose

love's intense,/ But yet whose justice ne'er could be withstood’ the recovered poet is

now transformed, by the mediation of Christ, into a lyre of God in both body and soul:

He pitying did a second birth bestow

A birth of joy—not like the first of tears and woe.

Ye strengthen'd feet, forth to his altar move;

Quicken, ye new-strung nerves, th' enraptur'd lyre;

Ye heav'n-directed eyes, overflow with love;

Glow, glow, my soul, with pure seraphic fire;

Deeds, thoughts, and words no more his mandates break,

But to his endless glory work, conceive, and speak.

Within a year of publication of this hymn Smart was admitted to St. Luke's Hospital for

Lunatics. Even though he was released ‘uncured’ in 1758, Smart was kept in

confinement till 1763 – possibly for a few years in his own house and afterwards at a

private asylum. It was during the seven years of his incarceration that Smart produced

‘an astonishing quantity of brilliant and original poetry.’

17

Between 1757 and 1763 he wrote A Song to David; most if not all of A

Translation of the Psalms of David and "Hymns and Spiritual Songs for the

Fasts and Festivals of the Church of England" (published together in 1765);

and the lengthy manuscript of Jubilate Agno, the surviving fragments of

which, amounting to more than seventeen hundred verses, represent only

about a third of what he actually wrote.

Smart continued to write other kinds of poems after 1763. The three small collections of

his verse published in these years contain short odes, complimentary addresses, fables,

songs, epigrams, and so on. But even though they look very similar to the poems written

in his early career, according to Karina Williamson Smart seems to have been trying out

a new kind of secularized religious poetry in these volumes, ‘in which the light lyrical

framework delicately implies a message of Christian hope and reassurance. But nothing

that Smart produced after 1763 seems to have been a success with the public or the

critics.

During the last years of his life Smart lived in great poverty and even landed up in the

debtor’s prison. His writings were generally dismissed as those of a madman. His second

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oratorio, Abimelech (1768), was performed only once in his lifetime; The Parables of Our

Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (1768) was dismissed with derision by the Monthly Review

(May 1768) and with the faintest of praise by the Critical Review (April 1768); while

Hymns, for the Amusement of Children (1771), his last work, was totally ignored. Karina

Williamson notes, after Robert Brittain, that in some of these hymns a ‘simplicity of

diction’ is combined with ‘the most startlingly accurate arrangement of thought’ to

achieve a quality similar to that of Blake's Songs of Innocence (1789).

The theology of these hymns is in sharp contrast to that of Isaac Watts's

Divine and Moral Songs for Children (1720), the most successful of earlier

attempts of the kind; where Watts's hymns are designed to save children

from the dangers of sin, Smart's emphasize the bounteousness of God's

blessings on earth and the joyful promise of salvation hereafter.

The last nail in the coffin of Smart’s fame as a poet was dug when the editor of the

posthumous collection of his verse decided in 1791 to exclude the Psalms, hymns,

versified parables, translations of Phaedrus and Horace, A Song to David, and other

poems from the small volumes of 1763-1764, on the grounds that they showed

‘melancholy proofs of the recent estrangement of his mind’. By the time of his death,

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Smart's reputation as a poet had suffered an almost complete eclipse. From being the

prize-winning poet of Cambridge, with ‘the sublimest energies of religion’ at his

command,

he sank in estimation into "poor Smart the mad poet," as Thomas Percy

described him in a 17 October 1786 letter to Edmond Malone, and thence

into comparative neglect until the twentieth century.

Despite respectful references to some of his other works and occasional reprintings,

Smart became generally known as a one-poem poet – the author of A Song to David.

Even the publication by Edmund Blunden of some of Smart's hymns, psalms, Horatian

translations, and other poems in 1924 remained a passing critical interest, without

altering the popular perception of Smart as the author of a solitary masterpiece--an

‘inestimable jewel buried in an ash-heap,’ as Edmund Gosse described it.

The real turning point came with the discovery in 1939 of Jubilate Agno, the

work which, even more than A Song to David, has captured the interest of

modern poets--including Allen Ginsberg, Alec Hope, John Heath-Stubbs,

Peter Porter, Jeremy Reed, and Wendy Cope -- many of whom have paid him

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the tribute of imitation and parody; while through Benjamin Britten's festival

cantata, Rejoice in the Lamb (1943), a setting of portions of Jubilate Agno,

the poetry of Christopher Smart has found a response among many for

whom poetry ordinarily has little appeal.

Smart began to be reclaimed as a religious poet mainly because his great religious

poems – A Song to David and Jubilate Agno – were rediscovered as the poetry of

madness. While most eighteenth century and nineteenth century critics tended to

dismiss the poems written during his asylum confinement as the ravings of a madman,

early twentieth century scholars like Lawrence Binyon and Geoffrey Grigson recognised

Smart as ‘a case of fascinating interest’ – ‘doubly mysterious because of his madness’.

The works of recent scholars and biographers of Smart, not a little influenced by

Foucault’s seminal work on the great divide between reason and unreason during the

age of enlightenment, have tended to focus on the modernity of Smart’s madness.

Instead of following the line of a possible medical diagnosis of that madness as manic-

depressive disorder, Clement Hawes characterizes the modernity of Smart’s poetry as

infused with a rhetoric of ‘religious mania’ underlined by his belief in the revolutionary

ideals of European radicalism, which rendered his poetry not only deviant but

dangerous to eighteenth century investments in reason and respectability.

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Recent biographers like Clement Hawes and Chris Mounsey as well as editors like

Marcus Walsh, Karina Williamson, Betty Rizzo and others have drawn attention to

Christopher Smart’s religious poetry as essentially embedded in modernity.

Postmodernist theologians like John Milbank, Graham Ward, and Catherine Pickstock, in

the Introduction to their book Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, even suggest that

Smart was a precursor of the theology that Milbank et al have branded ‘radical

orthodoxy’:

the great Christian critics of the Enlightenment – Christopher Smart,

Hamann, Jacobi, Kierkegaard, Peguy, Chesterton, and others – in different

ways saw that what secularity had most ruined and actually denied were the

very things it apparently celebrated: embodied life, self-expression,

sexuality, aesthetic experience, human political community. Their

contention… was that only transcendence, which 'suspends' these things in

the sense of interrupting them, 'suspends' them also in the other sense of

upholding their relative worth over- against the void. Such radicalism indeed

refuses the secular, but at the same time it does ‘re-envision’ a Christianity

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which never sufficiently valued the mediating participatory sphere which

alone can lead us to God.

The ‘modernity’ of Smart’s religious poetry had a great impact on twentieth century

modernist poets from W.B. Yeats to Edith Sitwell, Allen Ginsberg, Theodore Roethke,

Peter Porter, and others. One may even venture to say that Smart has turned out to be

a ‘poet’s poet’ in the eyes of posterity. As Karina Williamson observes:

It is notable that beginning with Robert Browning, it has been poets rather

than critics who have been the warmest and most perceptive admirers of the

poetry of Christopher Smart. In a 1975 radio broadcast in Australia, Peter

Porter spoke of Smart as "the purest case of man's vision prevailing over the

spirit of his times." While it would be facile and unilluminating to

characterize Smart as a proto-Romantic, there can be no doubt that the

combination of visionary power, Christian ardor, and lyrical virtuosity in his

finest poetry was unappreciated and unmatched in his own age.

Even if one refrains from reading Christopher Smart as a ‘persecuted mystic ’ and holds,

like Norman Callan, that in reading Smart’s writings ‘we are brought up against the

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problem of … the personality of a man who does not recognize that his misfortunes may

in some, degree be due to his own failings,’ Smart’s religious poetry is still best

represented by Edith Sitwell – one of the first twentieth century poets to pay a glowing

tribute to Smart and his relationship with God:

Heaven was undimmed by the cruelties and by the darkness of

Bedlam, unbroken by starvation, warm in the midst of that deathly

cold. This madman of genius, this poet of genius, for all the barriers

of his madness, continued to walk in the cool of the evening with his

God.

Chapter Division

(4392 words)

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