Christopher Smart Biography Quotes 1 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Christopher Smart was born in 1722 in England and became one of the most distinctive religious and satirical poets of the eighteenth century. He showed precocious talent and won a place at Cambridge, where he was associated with Pembroke College. At the university he quickly gained a reputation for Latin and English verse, and he began to shape the mixture of devout intensity and comic invention that would later define his career. The most visible symbol of his early success was the Seatonian Prize, a prestigious award for sacred poetry that he won repeatedly in the early 1750s, establishing him as a leading voice in Anglican devotional literature.

Cambridge Laurels and Early Works
While still associated with Cambridge, Smart published The Hop-Garden (1752), a georgic poem that combines technical description with elevated style, turning the Kentish hop fields into a subject fit for high art. The poem showcased his command of classical models as well as his English idiom, and it announced a writer equally at home in rural praise and theological meditation. These years gave him friends and patrons, but they also introduced him to the pressures of writing for income, something that would become a permanent feature of his life.

London Career and the Newbery Connection
Smart moved into the bustling literary world of London, where he worked for the influential publisher John Newbery. Newbery employed him as a hack writer in the best and worst senses of the term: Smart edited and contributed to periodicals, produced translations and paraphrases, and wrote for a wide public. He adopted the comic persona of Mrs. Mary Midnight for a satirical magazine titled The Midwife, using the fictional voice of an older London woman to lampoon fashions, theater, and authors. This persona allowed him to blend social observation with brash performance, and it made him locally famous as a wit.

Marriage and Family
While attached to Newbery's circle, Smart married Anna Maria Carnan, Newbery's stepdaughter. The marriage linked his domestic life to the business of publishing, bringing opportunities but also tensions when deadlines, debts, and health crises intervened. Smart and Anna Maria had children, and contemporary testimonies suggest he could be deeply affectionate and conscientious at home, even as his finances grew precarious.

Mental Health, Confinement, and Friendship with Samuel Johnson
In the mid-1750s Smart suffered a profound religious crisis. He was reported to pray aloud in public compulsively, a practice that frightened some acquaintances and delighted others who admired his sincerity. The episode led to his confinement, first in St. Luke's Hospital for Lunatics and later in a private asylum. His friend Samuel Johnson, the preeminent critic and lexicographer, defended him, remarking that he would willingly pray with "Kit Smart" and that Smart's devotions harmed no one. Johnson's circle, later chronicled by James Boswell, helped preserve the memory of Smart as both learned and devout, a man whose zeal overflowed the bounds of social propriety but also fueled extraordinary poetry.

Poems of Vision: Jubilate Agno and A Song to David
During confinement Smart composed Jubilate Agno, a visionary sequence in which biblical cadences meet private symbolism. In its most famous passage the poet contemplates his cat Jeoffry as an emblem of praise, turning an ordinary creature into a liturgical subject. The poem, however, remained unknown to the eighteenth century and was not published until the twentieth century. By contrast, A Song to David (1763) appeared soon after his release and astonished contemporaries with its sustained hymnlike fervor and inventive imagery. Johnson and others later singled it out as proof that Smart's religious intensity could produce high art. These two works bookend his reputation: one long hidden but now central to modern assessments, the other a contemporary marvel that showed how scriptural passion could be made new.

Translator, Hymnist, and Writer for Children
Smart's Anglican piety shaped a career beyond original verse. He produced a translation of the Psalms of David, aiming to render their praise and lament in vigorous English. He also wrote hymns for children, an area cultivated by Newbery's press, which sought to combine moral instruction with entertainment. This diversity of output, devotional poetry, educational pieces, satire, and translation, reflects the pressures and possibilities of Grub Street. It also shows Smart's conviction that sacred literature could meet audiences where they were, in homes and schools as well as churches and universities.

Later Years, Debt, and Death
Despite periods of energetic publication, Smart's finances never stabilized. He drifted in and out of debt, at times confined for nonpayment, a common fate for writers without secure patronage. He died in London in 1771, with friends noting the mixture of brilliance and hardship that had marked his life. His passing closed a chapter of mid-century literary culture in which religious enthusiasm, commercial print, and personal vulnerability met on the page and in the street.

Legacy and Reputation
Smart's legacy grew unevenly. Nineteenth-century readers admired A Song to David but knew little of Jubilate Agno. Twentieth-century scholars brought the asylum manuscripts to light, transforming his reputation from eccentric sacred versifier to visionary poet of praise and perception. John Newbery and Anna Maria Carnan remain central to his story as the family and press that enabled much of his work, even as that link entangled him in debts and obligations. Samuel Johnson and, through him, James Boswell preserved a humane portrait of Smart as a man whose piety sometimes overwhelmed social convention but whose genius was undeniable. Today he stands as a poet who turned the habits of worship into art, who could laugh at the follies of the town as Mrs. Mary Midnight, and who found in the psalms and in the ordinary world materials for extraordinary praise.

Our collection contains 1 quotes who is written by Christopher, under the main topics: God.