Christopher Smart: Prayer and Praise
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More on proto Romanticism, this time through Christopher Smart. His Jobean catalogues. His sense of the infinite variety of the world, and the matching variety of language. David and his turning melancholy into poetry. Smart's version of doing the same. Relation to the sublime: the rhetorical sublime where the soul takes a proud flight (Longinus) as though it has written what it has only heard or read: Smart's relation to David's psalms the same. Hence the meaning of "for" in Smart, in Jubilate Agno and in the "Song to David:" because of, and for the purpose of. Reversal of cause and effect, of final and efficient cause. Prefiguration: Typology and fulfillment in the antitype: the relation to the rhetorical sublime and to the reversal of cause and effect, when poetry responds to the sublime and inspires it (compare Shelley's Defence of Poetry). The amazing "For Adoration" sequence in the "Song to David." B1 and B2 of Jubilate Agno.
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