page_title: Christopher Smart
section_title: Works
hierarchical_section_title: Christopher Smart / Works
caption_attribution_description: English: First page of Abimelech
context_page_description: Christopher Smart, was an English poet.
  He was a major contributor to two popular magazines and a friend to influential cultural icons like Samuel Johnson and Henry Fielding. Smart, a high church Anglican, was widely known throughout London.
  Smart was infamous as the pseudonymous midwife "Mrs. Mary Midnight" and widespread accounts of his father-in-law, John Newbery, locking him away in a mental asylum for many years over Smart's supposed religious "mania". Even after Smart's eventual release, a negative reputation continued to pursue him as he was known for incurring more debt than he could repay; this ultimately led to his confinement in debtors' prison until his death.
  Smart's two most widely known works are A Song to David and Jubilate Agno, both at least partly written during his confinement in asylum. However, Jubilate Agno was not published until 1939 and A Song to David received mixed reviews until the 19th century. To his contemporaries, Smart was known mainly for his many contributions in the journals The Midwife and The Student, along with his famous Seaton Prize poems and his mock epic The Hilliad.
context_section_description: Smart, throughout his career, published many known works. Although his works are far too many to list, a few of his most famous and important publications during his life include:
  A Song to David
  Poems on Several Occasions (including the Hop-Garden)
  The Hilliad
  The Hop-Garden
  Hymns and Spiritual Songs
  Epistle to Mrs. Tyler
  Psalm 58
  Psalm 114
  On A Lady Throwing Snow-Balls At Her Lover
  For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry
  On My Wife's Birth-Day
  The Sweets Of Evening
  Where's The Poker?
  The Pig
  The Long-Nosed Fair
  Hymns for the Amusement of Children
  The Oratorios Hannah and Abimelech
  The Parables of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ
  A Poetical Translation of the Fables of Phaedrus
  The "Seatonian Prize" poems
  A Translation of the Psalms of David
  The Works of Horace Prose and Verse
  One of his most famous poems, Jubilate Agno, was not published until 1939, by William Force Stead. In 1943, lines from this poem were set to music by Benjamin Britten with the translated title Rejoice in the Lamb.
  He is also credited with the writing of A Defence of Freemasonry (1765), also known as A Defence of Freemasonry as practised in the regular lodges, both foreign and domestic, under the Constitution of the English Grand Master, in which is contained a refutation of Mr. Dermott's absurd and ridiculous account of Freemasonry, in his book entitled 'Ahiman Rezon' and the several quries therein reflecting on the regular Masons, briefly considered and answered, that response to Laurence Dermott's Ahiman Rezon. Although there is no direct attribution on the text's titlepage, it was established as his work since its publication, and it includes a poem directly attributed to him.
  A two-volume edition of the  Complete Poems of Christopher Smart  was published in 1949 by Norman Callan, Professor of English at Queen Mary College, London (now University). There have been numerous reprints.
caption: First page of Abimelech (1768)
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