Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Mania as rhetoric
- PART I DEFIANT VOICE
- PART II PATRICIAN DIAGNOSIS
- PART III CHALLENGING LIMINALITY
- 5 Scribe-evangelist: popular writing and enthusiasm in Smart's Jubilate Agno
- 6 Double jeopardy: the provenance and reception of Jubilate Agno
- 7 Smart's bawdy politic: misogyny and the second Age of Horn in Jubilate Agno
- 8 Smart's poetics of place: myth versus utopia in Jubilate Agno
- Epilogue: Beyond pathology
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE AND THOUGHT
8 - Smart's poetics of place: myth versus utopia in Jubilate Agno
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Mania as rhetoric
- PART I DEFIANT VOICE
- PART II PATRICIAN DIAGNOSIS
- PART III CHALLENGING LIMINALITY
- 5 Scribe-evangelist: popular writing and enthusiasm in Smart's Jubilate Agno
- 6 Double jeopardy: the provenance and reception of Jubilate Agno
- 7 Smart's bawdy politic: misogyny and the second Age of Horn in Jubilate Agno
- 8 Smart's poetics of place: myth versus utopia in Jubilate Agno
- Epilogue: Beyond pathology
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE AND THOUGHT
Summary
For there is a traveling for the Glory of God without going to Italy or France.
Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, B 35The criticism of Christopher Smart's religious poems, especially Jubilate Agno, has been recurrently preoccupied with questions of vertical scale. What does it mean for Smart to link the gambols of his pet, Jeoffry the Cat, to Mary's Magnificat? And how shall we understand the interplay of smallness and sublimity in Smart, himself a diminutive man and self-proclaimed second “David”? Though these investigations have been crucial to the understanding, say, of Jubilate Agno's daring subversions of the Great Chain of Being – honored by Smart, as Geoffrey Hartman observes, only insofar as it continues to “electrify the tongue” – they have not adequately explored the poem's horizontal spatiality. Such an exploration, indeed, permits us to rethink the notion of Smart's supposed mania in a new context. It allows us to enter Jubilate Agno through the poem's utopian and millenarian dimension, which necessarily concerns place, and, more generally, through the politics of spatial location.
The topic of socially organized space serves to remind us again that the biographical Smart, in being confined to an asylum, suffered a dramatic contraction of his own horizons.
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- Mania and Literary StyleThe Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart, pp. 206 - 229Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996