Reading Christopher Smart in the Twenty-first Century by Wild Min;Chevalier Noel; & Noel Chevalier

Author:Wild, Min;Chevalier, Noel; & Noel Chevalier [Wild, Min & Chevalier, Noel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

1. PW2, 138.

2. William Levine, “‘Beyond the Limits of a Vulgar Fate’: The Renegotiation of Public and Private Concerns in the Careers of Gray and Other Mid-Eighteenth Century Poets,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 24, no. 1 (1995), 228–29.

3. Roberta Eve Tovey discusses Smart’s later-career transition toward a simpler, but also elliptical and ambiguous language in the Hymns in “‘I Speak for All’: Smart’s Conversion of the Hebrew Psalm,” Philological Quarterly 62, no. 3 (Summer 1983): 321, 323; see also David B. Morris, The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in Eighteenth-Century England (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1972), 170–80; and Marcus Walsh, “‘Community of Mind’: Christopher Smart and the Poetics of Allusion,” in CSE, 29–46.

4. Clement Hawes, Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 132–54; cf. Shaun Irlam, Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 54–57.

5. Alexander Pope, ΠEPI BAӨOYΣ [Peri Bathous]; or, The Art of Sinking in Poetry, in Selected Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Paul Hammond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 170–212 (hereafter cited parenthetically in text).

6. Christopher Smart, The Poetical Works: Vol. 3, A Translation of the Psalms of David, ed. Marcus Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 4 (hereafter cited as PW3; parenthetically in text by psalm number and lines).

7. For a discussion of how Smart’s Christianized Psalms overlooked the force of Anglican tradition and decorum and were also not well received as literary specimens of verse translation, see Marcus Walsh, introduction to Translation of the Psalms, PW3, xvi–xvii, xxviii–xxix.

8. Moira Dearnley, The Poetry of Christopher Smart (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 240.

9. “On the Sublime” and “On the Profound,” in Stu., vol. 2, 184–87; vol. 2, 388–90. See also Min Wild’s discussion of these and other neo-Scriblerian journalism in CS&S, 103–25.

10. A complete discussion of Smart’s varying attitudes toward Pope over his career could easily constitute a separate chapter. Smart’s early Latin translations of Pope’s “Ode for Music on St. Cecilia’s Day” and An Essay on Criticism should be balanced against his mixture of emulation and criticism of Pope in the preface to Smart’s 1767 translations of Horace, in The Poetical Works: Vol. 5, The Works of Horace, Translated into Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) (hereafter cited as PW5; parenthetically in text). Note Smart’s choice to use a “more familiar measure,” tetrameter couplets, for Horace’s satirical “conversation pieces” (PW5, 6) rather than Pope’s heroic couplets, and Smart’s more compressed (and presumably more sublime) translation of a passage in Homer that he critically juxtaposes with Pope’s (PW5, 9). See also Betty Rizzo, “Christopher Smart’s Poetics,” in CSE, 125–31.

11. Jubilate Agno, PW1, B404.

12. Though he speaks through his comic persona, Mary Midnight, in an intentionally reductive survey of how wit has been wrongly defined by past critical authorities, Smart asserts that Pope’s aphoristic couplet “places Wit intirely in the Expression” and reduces the “witty” to the “Rhetorical.” See “On Wit,” in MW (1753), 3:110.

13. Christopher Devlin, Poor Kit Smart (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961), 138–39.

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