The 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.