Word: smarted
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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POEMS BY CHRISTOPHER SMART (326 pp.] -Edited, with an Introduction & Notes, by Robert Brittain-Princeton University...
When Poet Robert Browning stumbled across a devotional poem entitled A Song to David, by one Christopher Smart (1722-1771), he was both awed and delighted. Poet Smart's Song was a haunting combination of the lyrical and the intellectual, clothed in words that threw fresh lights and colors upon many a common thing...
...when Browning began eagerly to search for further masterpieces by Christopher Smart, he could find nothing but a dull collection of odes and occasional pieces. Browning did discover, however, that poor Poet Smart had been confined in an asylum just before A Song to David was first published - which prompted Browning to the romantic conclusion that Smart had been no better than a hack while, he had his wits; that when he lost them his dormant genius had burst into bloom...
Editor Robert Brittain, a longtime Smart addict, does his best to destroy this theory by presenting a selection of Smart's poems, most of which Browning never read. His volume shows that A Song to David was not Smart's only masterpiece; but it also shows that the sufferings Smart experienced because of his fits of madness gave his best work a peculiar profundity...
...Pray Without Ceasing." Smart was driven to distraction by overwork and financial worries as early as his Cambridge days, and tried to earn money from his writing. In one play, noted a contemporary, "He acts five Parts himself, & is only sorry, he can't do all the rest, he has also advertised a Collection of Odes; & [as] for his Vanity & Faculty of Lyeing, they are come to their full Maturity, all this . . . must come to a Jayl, or Bedlam...