A Song To David - Critical Response

Critical Response

Many contemporary critics of Christopher Smart attacked various aspects of A Song to David upon its publication. The Critical Review praised the poem with "great rapture and devotion is discernible in this extatic song. It is a fine piece of ruins, and must at once please and affect a sensible mind" but brought up the "propriety of a Protestant's offering up either hymns or prayers to the dead" like a Catholic would. The Monthly Review felt that the poem was "irregularly great" although a few stanzas showed "a grandeur, a majesty of thought, not without a happiness of expression." Professional critics were not the only ones to demonstrate a less than accepting view of A Song to David; William Mason wrote to Thomas Gray, "I have seen his Song to David & from thence conclude him as mad as ever."

Not every response was negative, and Christopher received much support within the London poet community. William Kenrick, Christopher’s former rival, praised the poem in a poem of his own printed May 25, 1763. Also, John Lockman followed on June 21, 1763, with his own poem in praise of Christopher’s and Samuel Boyce followed this on July 15, 1763 with his. Regardless of what these poets felt, Christopher Smart's daughter, Elizabeth, claimed that "all a daughter's partiality could not lead the writer of this to admire it, nor all her pains, after many perusals, discover the beauties with which, when supposed lost, it was so liberally endowed." Later, when the text was recovered and reprinted in 1819, John Scott viewed the poem as proof that Christopher was both insane and a poet: the poem was had the benefit of "originality" and "beautiful and well selected imagery" but there were "symptoms of the author's state of mind, in a frequent vagueness of meaning, in an abruptness of transition, and sometimes in the near neighbourhood of the most incongruous ideas."

Although it took a century later before a positive twist was put on Christopher Smart's time in a mental asylum, Robert Browning later remarked in his Parleyings (1887) that A Song to David was great because Smart was mad, and that the poem allowed Smart to rank alongside of Milton and Keats. Christopher Smart, as Browning's poem claims,

"pierced the screen

Twixt thing and word, lit language straight from soul, -

Left no fine film-flake on the naked coal

Live from the censer"

It was Browning's remarks that brought about a later "appreciation: of A Song to David. More specifically, on a review of Browning Parleying claimed that Christopher Smart was:

"possessed by his subject... and where there is true possession - where the fires of the poet's imagination are not choked by self-consciousness or by too much fuel from the intellect - idiosyncracy, mannerism, and even conventional formulae are for the time 'burnt and purged away'."

In addition to this review, Dante Gabriel Rossetti claimed that A Song to David was "the only great accomplished poem of the last century." Two years later, Francis Palgrave wrote that the Song exhibited "noble wildness and transitions from grandeur to tenderness, from Earth to Heaven" and it was "unique in our Poetry." Seven years after Palgrave, John Churton Collins agreed with Rosetti and Palgrave, but not to the same degree, when he claims, "This poem stands alone, the most extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps, in our literature, the one rapt strain in the poetry of the eighteenth century, the work of a poet who, though he produced much, has not produced elsewhere a single line which indicates the power here displayed."