Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry
Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats
“I do not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as anyone else. Another charge was that he did not love clean linen, and I have no passion for it.” — Dr. Johnson
Christopher Smart, born in 1722, spent over 10 years of his life locked up in mental institutions (although “institution” is not the right word for what such establishments were back then). He seemed to suffer from some sort of religious ecstasy (although “suffering” may not be the right word at all). He is probably most known for his poem about his cat Geoffrey – a long devotional to his cat, repetitive and hypnotic, like a religious service, with exquisitely detailed (and true) observations about the behavior of cats. I LOVE that poem. I think I would have liked Christopher Smart. I would have prayed with him, no problem. Doesn’t bother me at all. He was born in Kent, and after his father’s death when he was 11, he was kind of taken under the wing of the Vane family (his father had been a steward at their home). They made sure he went to college, Pembroke. He became friends with Alexander Pope, through his translations and poems, and also somehow became acquainted with Dr. Johnson. He had problems right off the bat with drinking and money: he was irresponsible with both. He was arrested in 1747 for not paying his debts. He needed to make a living. He moved to London. He worked as an editor. He got married. In 1756 he was sent to an insane asylum and he stayed locked up until 1763. His wife left him, while he was imprisoned, but in general he had not alienated his friends, not completely, and everyone stood by him, trying to help him out, financially or otherwise (he had two children by this point). While he was in the asylum, he wrote The Song to David. It was published the year of his release. His intense religious poetry came in the couple of years following.
He’s a weird case. He died in 1771. His life was chaotic, to some degree, but his confinement was almost a blessing in that it cut down on all distractions and allowed him the space to praise God as much as he wanted to. It wouldn’t disturb anyone in there, because EVERYONE was nuts. It was also a blessing because he could write, without the pressure of having to make a living, which had always been hard for him. I don’t know. I am hesitant of making a blessing out of madness merely because some good art came out of it. Anyone who has experienced madness to any degree will know that nobody in their right mind would ever choose it. It is a curse, not a blessing. However: as Dr. Johnson’s quote that opens this post suggests: Smart’s madness seemed to be quite benign. He was in love with God. He wanted to praise God from the moment he woke up until he went to sleep. He would fall to his knees in the middle of public squares, praising God. Well, I’ve seen such people all over New York. Perhaps a bit annoying if you are trying to walk down that sidewalk, but other than that, what’s the harm?
Michael Schmidt wrote, in terms of how all this might have impacted his poetry:
Smart’s originality is the product not of a candid, puzzled, anxious personality like William Cowper’s, nor the lucid, nostalgic and humane sensibility of a Goldsmith. It’s the product of a distinctly poetic imagination, using that term in a classical sense. Smart seldom composes verse: he is a poet rare in any age, most rare in the eighteenth century, a spiritual enthusiast and a consummate verbal artist. He might resemble Blake, only he has greater formal tact, a better ear, a better (that is, a less didactic) nature. His poems exist to celebrate God, not to cajole, instruct and persuade us.
Christopher Smart sat and watched his cat Geoffrey stretching and playing in the sun, and became overwhelmed by God’s nearness and presence, obvious to him in every ripple of muscle in the cat’s body. It’s gorgeous stuff. Gorgeous poetry. I am sure there were other levels of his madness, perhaps there was a demonic side to it as well – but it was that religious glory that he wrote from, and the madness allowed him to perceive it in all its grandeur and eternity. So I don’t know. Who cares. We have the work to consider. Robert Graves wrote:
Christopher Smart wrote A Song to David in a lunatic asylum, and when his collected poems were published in 1791, it was omitted as ‘not acceptable to the reader’. This poem is formally addressed to David – Smart knew that he was no madder than King David had been, and a tradition survives that he scrabbled the verses with a key on the wall of his cell.
Christopher Smart’s influence was quite local during his own time, but he has easily crossed the centuries. Allen Ginsberg spoke of him as a huge influence. You can see why. Read that poem about the cat Geoffrey and you can almost feel Christopher Smart “rapping” about the cat, riffing, going from one thing to another … a la the Beats of the 40s and 50s, with complete confidence in what Ginsberg, centuries later, would call “first thought best thought”.
His lines don’t look like other people’s lines. At least not in the 18th century. His lines look like the lines from poets in the mid 20th century. That’s how crazily transcendent this guy was. Launched above his contemporaries into a timeless ether. Pleasing only himself, hoping to please God. He often begins all lines with the same word, giving the verse an incantatory feel. In the wrong hands, this could be dreadful stuff. Look at some of the lesser Beats, or some of the poetry-slammers today. Riffing is not always good, and no: first thought is not always best thought. But something else is going on with Christopher Smart. It is almost incomprehensible that he wrote like this in the 1700s. His lines are long and conversational (they look like the lines of “Howl” – or, I should say, Ginsberg clearly was imitating what Smart’s lines looked like), and take you, repetitively, into the heart of the religious and personal experience.
Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets
However [Song to David] was written, they remain a wonder and a mystery, begotten of the Bible, of broad and deep learning, and of some catalyst that made a confusion that poet resolved, against chaos as it were, to put in some sort of order.
For the word of God is a sword on my side – no matter what other weapon a stick or a straw.
For I have adventured myself in the name of the Lord, and he hath marked me for his own.
For I bless God the Postmaster general & all conveyancers of letters under his care especially Allen & Shelvock.
For my grounds in New Canaan shall infinitely compensate for the flats & maynes of Staindrop Moore.
For the praise of God can give to a mute faith the notes of a nightingale.Is it nonsense? Yes. Is it nonsense? No.
Donald Davie writes:
It is not impossible that when Smart is judged over the whole range of his various productions – conventional in form as well as unconventional, light and even ribald as well as devotional, urbane or tender as well as sublime – he will be thought of as the greatest English poet between Pope and Wordsworth.
Schmidt addresses the whole madness issue in his section on Smart:
We readily assume that he wrote in madness, that what he wrote, in its forms and themes, partakes of his derangement. Or we divide the work into sane and “insane” and judge the parts by distinct criteria. But his madness can be seen not so much as a disorder as alternative order, his religious vision not as eccentric but as direct, comprehensive. To say an artist is “mad” is to say very little. What matters is what he makes of language. Smart makes passionate poetry…
He is not an imitator even in his translations, which hold the original in a form and language that make no concessions. He feels and conveys the force of the poetry he admires. His intution is attuned to a broad tradition, not caught in the rut of convention. Marcus Walsh calls Smart’s mature style “mannered, religiose and self-conscious” – and each becomes a positive critical term, for together they produce a “homogenous” style that “unifies” – the crucial word – “a number of divergent influences”. It is the paradoxical combination of influences, biblical and classical, and the disruptions his imagination registers, that make him outstanding and eccentric. Learning and accidents of biography delver him from the bondage of Augustan convention into the sometimes anarchic, vertiginous freedom of Jubliate Agno and the originality of the Song to David. He has few heirs.
Goosebumps. Check out his stuff if you are not familiar with it. Even if you’re not into the whole religious thing. Get into it for the language. And if you’re a cat-lover or owner, please, do, go check out the poem for his cat Jeoffrey. I’ve linked to it and posted it often, because – living as I do with a furry frightening beast – Christopher Smart’s lines often come to mind. Certain things she will do will remind me of this or that line of his long poem, and it just makes me laugh. I think of that 18th century kitty cat named Geoffrey, and I love that the same crap was going on back then as now.
Here’s a poem included in the Six Centuries of Great Poetry book:
The Nativity Of Our Lord
Where is this stupendous stranger,
Swains of Solyma, advise?
Lead me to my Master’s manger,
Show me where my Saviour lies?
O Most Mighty! O Most Holy!
Far beyond the seraph’s thought,
Art thou then so mean and lowly
As unheeded prophets taught?
O the magnitude of meekness!
Worth from worth immortal sprung;
O the strength of infant weakness,
If eternal is so young!
If so young and thus eternal,
Michael tune the shepherd’s reed,
Where the scenes are ever vernal,
And the loves be Love indeed!
See the God blasphem’d and doubted
In the schools of Greece and Rome;
See the pow’rs of darkness routed,
Taken at their utmost gloom.
Nature’s decorations glisten
Far above their usual trim;
Birds on box and laurels listen,
As so near the cherubs hymn.
Boreas now no longer winters
On the desolated coast;
Oaks no more are riv’n in splinters
By the whirlwind and his host.
Spinks and ouzels sing sublimely,
“We too have a Saviour born”;
Whiter blossoms burst untimely
On the blest Mosaic thorn.
God all-bounteous, all-creative,
Whom no ills from good dissuade,
Is incarnate, and a native
Of the very world He made.
