Word: smarted
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Burial? Nobody could prove anything shady or illegal about the Mapes Hotel loan, but neither could anybody prove that the RFC's action looked very smart. There was a more basic question: Was it a proper Government function in boom times to lend money to businesses where private bankers refused to tread? Wasn't RFC too often supporting an army of potential bankrupts, to keep them going against sharper competitors...
That cruel prophecy soon came true. Smart found a job with a bookseller who waxed rich on the profits he made from concoctions such as "Dr. Hooper's Female Pills." Smart became his hack, churning out for him a flow of trite but salable verse and prose. Then Smart's high-strung system collapsed. He took to interpreting literally Christ's "injunction to pray without ceasing"-and pray Smart did, whenever he was moved to do so, whether in public places or in the small hours of the morning, summoning those near him to do likewise...
...next few years Smart spent in confinement, where he wrote Rejoice in the Lamb, praising the Lord in a loose-strung jumble of beauty and innocent absurdity...
Madness & Marrow. Poet Smart's contemporaries found more madness than marrow in his passionate and personal use of the English tongue. Dropped by many of his friends, ignored by the reading public, Smart died on parole from a debtors' prison...
...Editor Brittain's hope that today's, readers will give poor Smart "his rightful place in the front rank of English devotional lyricists." At any rate, Brittain's efforts may rescue Smart from his long imprisonment in a literary footnote. He was put there by his onetime friend Dr. Samuel Johnson, who once declared: "I did 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 any one else. Another charge was that...