Christopher Smart Biography Quotes 1 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Christopher Smart was born on 11 April 1722, probably at Shipbourne in Kent, into a family poised between gentility and dependence. His father, Peter Smart, served as steward to William Vane, 1st Baron Barnard, at Fairlawne and later at Barnard Castle, and the move north placed the boy within the orbit of a great household without making him its equal. That ambiguous social position mattered. Smart grew up seeing patronage at close range - its opportunities, humiliations, and demands for performance. His mother, Winifred Griffiths, came from a Welsh family, and the combination of provincial rootedness, household culture, and Anglican habit formed a sensibility at once ceremonious and intensely inward.

As a child he was precocious, praised for his memory and gift for verse, and reportedly encouraged by the Duchess of Cleveland, another sign that aristocratic notice would shadow his life from the beginning. The England into which he was born was commercially expanding, politically Hanoverian, and culturally dominated by Augustan models of wit, order, and public polish. Yet Smart's imagination would never remain fully within that polite framework. Even early in life there appears a tension that would define him: the desire to succeed in metropolitan literary society, and an equal susceptibility to rapture, religious intensity, and states of feeling that society could neither reward nor comfortably classify.

Education and Formative Influences

Smart was educated at Durham School and entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, in 1739 as a sizar, a status that again joined distinction to dependence. At Cambridge he won the Seatonian Prize repeatedly for sacred poetry, showing both technical command and a serious engagement with devotional verse. He took his BA in 1743 and was elected a fellow of Pembroke, but his temperament was never that of a cloistered don. He absorbed Horace, Pope, Milton, the Bible, and the liturgy; he also learned the arts of occasional verse, satire, translation, and public literary display. Cambridge sharpened his ear for classical structure while deepening a specifically Anglican imagination in which praise, scriptural cadence, and natural observation were inseparable. That fusion would later make his most original work seem at once archaic, visionary, and startlingly modern.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

Leaving the university world for London, Smart entered Grub Street's precarious brilliance in the 1740s and 1750s. He wrote for magazines, produced translations, and became known for wit, energy, and astonishing versatility. He married Anna Maria Carnan in 1753; through her stepfather, the publisher John Newbery, he gained important commercial connections and worked on periodicals such as The Midwife and The Student. He also wrote for the stage and published poems that showed both polish and strangeness, including "The Hop-Garden" and "The Hilliad", a reckless satire on John Hill that helped embroil him in literary feuds. His most famous public success was "A Song to David" (1763), a sublime hymn of kingship, music, and sacred order. But the decisive turning point was his mental collapse, usually dated to the late 1750s. Confined for periods in St. Luke's Hospital and then in Mr. Potter's private madhouse, he was said to have prayed compulsively and to have scandalized acquaintances by insisting on public acts of devotion. Out of or alongside this confinement came the extraordinary "Jubilate Agno", unpublished in his lifetime, and the deeply moving "A Translation of the Psalms of David". Released but never financially secure, estranged from his wife, and burdened by debt, he spent his last years writing and translating until his death in London on 21 May 1771.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Smart's inner life is the key to his work. He began within Augustan decorum, but his mature poetry breaks open the boundaries between reason and ecstasy, private obsession and liturgical order. He did not reject intelligence; he radicalized it into praise. In "Jubilate Agno", classification becomes devotion, and catalog becomes revelation. “For there is a sound reasoning upon all flowers”. That sentence captures his mind perfectly: analytic yet enraptured, convinced that creation is legible because it is sacred. He follows it at once with, “For flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ”. , making botany, language, and theology part of one system of correspondences. What others heard as derangement can also be read as a fierce attempt to restore meaning to a disordered world.

His style is marked by antiphonal repetition, biblical parallelism, sudden leaps in scale, and an almost childlike exactness of naming. He can move from the cosmic to the domestic without strain because, for him, praise is the deepest law of being. The famous passages on his cat Jeoffry are not whimsical digressions but evidence of a sacramental imagination in which every creature has vocation. That is why his poetry feels both intensely personal and impersonal: the self is wounded, isolated, and at times manic, yet it seeks healing by joining the universal chorus of praise. Smart's psychology was not merely instability; it was an extreme permeability to pattern, sound, emblem, and divine presence. His greatest poems convert affliction into form without disguising the cost.

Legacy and Influence

Smart died in relative obscurity, but posterity steadily moved him from curiosity to major poet. Nineteenth-century readers often treated him as a pathetic mad genius; twentieth-century criticism, especially after the recovery and publication of "Jubilate Agno", recognized the audacity of his religious imagination and formal innovation. He now stands as a crucial bridge between Augustan poise and Romantic inwardness, and as a precursor to poets who unite spiritual intensity with linguistic experiment. His work has appealed to writers as different as Robert Browning, T. S. Eliot, and Ted Hughes because it proves that devotion need not be tame, and that brokenness can generate original vision. Smart endures not simply for biographical drama but because he found a way to make praise capacious enough to include wit, suffering, animals, scripture, and the whole luminous disorder of creation.