The Contract Was Bad, But the Poetry Was Good

Possibly not the greatest move in the history of management:

In 1755 Smart signed a 99-year contract with Tom Gardner to write for the Universal Visiter, and the following year (shortly after his largely delightful translation of Horace was finished) he fell down in a crowded street raving in prayer. The following year – after many, many weird incidents that a merciful history would cover in silence – he was locked up in Saint Luke’s Hospital for the Insane, where he continued to write, was beloved by the staff, but didn’t always recognize the friends and family who at first flocked to see him (strangers could pay a small sum to go and look at him too … Saint Luke’s, like every other madhouse, made most of its operating budget by such revenue). He was also, perhaps pointedly, free from prosecution for debt while he was there.

And that was the remainder of Christopher Smart’s life, which is a pretty melancholy prospect. He continued to write poetry – and some of it is monumentally, almost monstrously strange – but his marriage disintegrated, and finances were as abysmal as always (friends – including the renowned actor David Garrick – often put on benefits for his aid, but the lessons of Raby Castle ran too deep, and Smart never shook them off). In 1770 he was arrested for debt one last time and died in debtor’s prison the following year, with most of his work lost and even the extant stuff – plays, essays, prefaces, and some of the strangest, most luminous religious poetry ever written in English – scattered to the four winds.

If you want to read them, here are the poems.

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