Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Abbott, Charles David

Titel

Christopher Smart's Madness

Ist Teil von

• PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 1930-12, Vol.45 (4), p.1014-1022

Ort / Verlag

New York, etc: Modern Language Association of America

Erscheinungsjahr

1930

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Few lyric poems of the eighteenth century have aroused as much interest during the past fifty years as Christopher Smart's Song to David. Poets, critics, and scholars have lavished praises upon it ever since Browning so liberally commended it in his Parleyings. It appears—usually only in part—in nearly all the anthologies, and in England the entire text has several times been separately reprinted. So much attention to the poem has led inevitably to a desire for more knowledge about the poet, and various scholars have attempted to satisfy this desire. Nearly all, however, have been baffled by the complications of the poet's periods of insanity, or else have jumped to conclusions that will not fit the facts. The late Sir Edmund Gosse, by the beauty and urbanity of his appreciation of Smart's poetic genius, in Gossip in a Library in 1891, did much to rehabilitate him in the world of letters. Unfortunately, Sir Edmund was seriously wrong in many of his most essential statements concerning the poet's life, and his misconceptions and misinterpretations of the facts have served as the basis of nearly all subsequent accounts, including that by Thomas Seccombe in the Dictionary of National Biography.