Christopher Smart's Asylum Confinement

Christopher Smart's Asylum Confinement

The English poet Christopher Smart (1722–1771) was confined to mental asylums from May 1757 until January 1763. Smart was admitted into St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, Bethnal Green, London, on 6 May 1757, taken there by his father-in-law, John Newbery, although he may have been confined in a private madhouse before then. While in St Luke's he wrote Jubilate Agno and A Song to David, the poems considered to be his greatest works. Although many of his contemporaries agreed that Smart was "mad," accounts of his condition and its ramifications varied, and some felt that he had been committed unfairly.

Smart was diagnosed as "incurable" while at St Lukes, and when they ran out of funds for his care he was moved to Mr. Potter's asylum. All that is known of his years of confinement is that he wrote poetry. Smart's isolation led him to abandon the poetic genres of the 18th century that had marked his earlier work and to write religious poetry such as Jubilate Agno ("Rejoice in the Lamb"). His asylum poetry reveals a desire for "unmediated revelation", and it is possible that the self-evaluation found in his poetry represents an expression of evangelical Christianity.

Late 18th-century critics felt that Smart's madness justified them in ignoring his A Song to David, but during the following century Robert Browning and his contemporaries considered his condition to be the source of his genius. It was not until the 20th century, with the rediscovery of Jubilate Agno—not published until 1939—that critics reconsidered Smart's case and began to see him as a revolutionary poet, the possible target of a plot by his father-in-law, a publisher, to silence him.