christopher smart

Christopher Smart lost his father, Peter Smart, when he was eleven. The elder Smart was steward for the Vane family of Raby Castle in Durham, England. This association, combined with Smart's literary gifts, induced the Vanes to allot him with a small pension, assuring his education. Smart was educated in Durham and then Cambridge, but despite early promise began to have trouble with excessive drinking and spending, resulting in an arrest in 1747. Nonetheless he did fairly well, earning a fellowship at Cambridge, repeatedly winning literary awards, and supplementing his income with popular songs and plays. In 1752 he married Anna Maria Carman, daughter of a London publisher, and moved to that city.

In London Smart's work ranged from a critically well-regarded translation of Horace to hack writing under pseudonyms. He had already begun showing symptoms of his incipient obsessive-compulsive disorder the year before his marriage, and this further interfered with his ability to support himself. Samuel Johnson, a friend who also contributed to one of Smart's magazines, wrote that, "My poor friend Smart showed the disturbance of his mind by falling upon his knees, and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place." Later, when Smart was committed to St. Luke's Hospital, Johnson stated he believed the commitment unjustified, and visited Smart there.

Smart used the time to write, composing the visionary A Song to David and the Jubilate Agno during his incarceration. His wife and two daughters moved in with friends. He was briefly released, but never recovered financially and was supported by friends the last few years of his life. He died May 21, 1771.

Smart lived on in his intellectual, happier, descendant, William Blake, who shared his desire to place imagination over reason, as well as his religious passion—and who also, curiously, chose a member of the Tribe of Tiger as the subject of a poem....