Smart, Christopher

(1722-1771)

   Born in Kent, and educated at Durham, northeast England, he graduated M.A. from Pembroke Hall (now Pembroke College), Cambridge, in 1747 and was elected a fellow in 1745. In 1750 his poem "Hymn to the Supreme Being" won the Seatonian Prize, which helped him to pay his creditors. From 1751 until he died, he suffered from bouts of mental illness of a religious nature and spent many years in one hospital or another. Between 1751 and 1753, under the pseudonym "Mary Midnight," he ran a cheap journal, the Midwife, or the Old Woman's Magazine, where many of his compositions appeared under the pseudonym "Pentweazle." He died in the debtors' prison and was buried in St. Paul's Churchyard. Some of his publications: Hannah: An Oratorio, 1764. Hymns for the Amusement of Children, 1772. Poems on Several Occasions, 1763. The Parables of Jesus Christ, 1768. A Song to David, 1763. The Works of Horace, 1767. Some of his poems: "A Morning Hymn," "A Story of a Cock and a Bull," "Apollo and Daphne," "Inscriptions on an Aeolian Harp," "The Hop-Garden," "The Stars."

   Sources: A Sacrifice of Praise: An Anthology of Christian Poetry in English from Caedmon to the Mid-Twentieth Century. James H. Trott, ed. Cumberland House Publishing, 1999. Chapters into Verse, Vol. II: Gospels to Revelation. Robert Atwan and Laurance Wieder, eds. Oxford University Press, 1993. Christopher Smart: Selected Poems. Karina Williamson and Marcus Walsh, eds. Penguin Books, 1990. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). Microsoft Encarta 2006 (DVD). Microsoft Corporation, 2006. The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (http://library.stanford.edu). The Cherry-Tree. Geoffrey Grigson, ed. Phoenix House, 1959. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Book of Children's Verse. Iona Opie and Peter Opie, eds. Oxford University Press, 1973. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000.