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An Early Model for Smart's a Song to David

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert E. Brittain*
Affiliation:
Queens College

Extract

During a recent exchange of notes regarding our separate studies of Christopher Smart, Professor E. G. Ainsworth, Jr., of the University of Missouri, has called my attention in a query to an unsigned poem entitled “The Benedicite Paraphrased,” which appeared in Dodsley's The Museum, or Literary and Historical Register on December 6, 1746 (ii, 182). A detailed study of the poem has convinced me that it is Smart's work. If this attribution be accepted, the poem is of the first importance, for it must alter rather completely our view of Smart's career.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , March 1941 , pp. 165 - 174
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1941

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References

Note 1 in page 165 The Ode, Smart's first published poem in English, was appended to the second edition of Carmen Cl. Alexandri Pope in S. Caeciliam, 1746.

Note 2 in page 165 Christopher Hunter, The Collected Poems of Christopher Smart, Reading, 1791. (Introduction.)

Note 3 in page 165 Reprinted in The Midwife, ii, 35 (April, 1751). Two longer fragments are in The Student (i, 380 and ii, 39). There is a MS. “part of the First Canto of Hudibras, translated into Latin doggerel by a freshman of Pembroke, Christopher Smart” in the Library of Pembroke College.

Note 4 in page 173 Smart, Christopher: Rejoice in the Lamb, A Song from Bedlam, ed. W. Force Stead (London, 1939).