Smart, Christopher

▪ English poet

born April 11, 1722, Shipbourne, Kent, Eng.

died May 21, 1771, London

 English religious poet, best known for A Song to David (1763), in praise of the author of the Psalms, notable for flashes of childlike penetration and vivid imagination. In some respects his work anticipated that of William Blake and John Clare.

      After his education at the University of Cambridge, Smart was elected a fellow of Pembroke Hall (1745), but at about the age of 27 he became a hack writer in London. He was three times confined for madness (a mild religious mania), but his strange yet engaging personality won him such friends as Samuel Johnson, actor-manager David Garrick, playwright Oliver Goldsmith, and both Dr. Charles Burney, the musicologist, and his daughter, Fanny, the novelist. Smart died in a debtor's prison.

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