The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart: Volume V: The Works of Horace, Translated into Verse

by Christopher Smart, Karina Williamson (Editor)

Volume V of the collected poetry publishes Smart's verse translation of Horace for the first time since 1767. Made in the prodigiously creative years between his release from the madhouse and his death, the translation now emerges as testimony to Smart's tireless creativity and poetic energy, and as a significant contribution to the present reappraisal of Horace's influence on English literature. The editors provide an introduction, full scholarly apparatus, and a detailed and clarifying commentary which explains Smart's more obscure passages.

512 pages, Hardcover

Published August 1, 1996

About the author

Christopher Smart was an English poet. He was a major contributor to two popular magazines, The Midwife and The Student, 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 for 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.
His two most widely known works are A Song to David and Jubilate Agno, which are believed to have been written during his confinement in St. Luke's Asylum, although this is still debated by scholars as there is no record of when they were written. It is even more unclear when the works were written as Jubilate Agno was not published until 1939 when it was found in a library archive 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. Although he is recognized primarily as a religious poet, his poetry includes various other themes, such as his theories on nature and his promotion of English nationalism.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Turns out that some genres of Latin poetry lend themselves to my current lifestyle - periods of the night when I can’t get back to sleep, walks in the country. Having polished off an Audible recording of the complete works of Catullus, I listened to Horace’s Odes narrated in a plummy voice by Charlton Griffin. Had to google a few phrases to find the original translator: Christopher Smart, Works of Horace (London: 1780), the work of a Cambridge classicist. Still very readable—with one of the 19C reprints available for free PDF download from Internet Archive. Always worth checking the site before paying good money for a poorly done OCR version sold on certain e-text sites…