A BLESSED CONVEYANCER OF LETTERS: CHRISTOPHER SMART, AUTHOR AND EDITOR OF MISCELLANIES IN JUBILATE AGNO NOEL CHEVALIER Luther College, University of Regina I " W h e n William Force Stead first edited Jubilate Agno in 1939, he regarded the poem as valuable mainly as a source of biographical details concerning its author, Christopher Smart, even though he saw that it contained “plenty of rubbish [and] frequent intrusions of the meaningless and grotesque” (13-14). Stead’s reading of Jubilate Agno depends on the reader’s comprehending the mad poem as the unfiltered voice of the mad poet. His reading thus focusses on the poem’s mimetic power, its ability to provide readers with an accurate transcription of the workings of Smart’s disordered mind. As “A Song from Bedlam,” Jubilate Agno is said to speak with the authentic voice of madness.1 Although such a strict biographical equation seems facile, Stead is essen tially correct: Jubilate Agno is a biography of sorts. However, the “Christo pher Smart” represented in Jubilate Agno is a figure whom Smart devised to locate himself within the cosmology of his own poem. The poem has what Karina Williamson calls a “comprehensive evangelical purpose” (Williamson and Walsh 339); part of that purpose is revealed in Smart’s desire to include himself among the historical figures, animals, minerals, and other physical manifestations of God’s glory that he exhorts to offer praise in his canticle. Smart’s intrusion in his poem may seem like self-glorification, but any pos sibility that one name may dominate the text is held in check by the poem’s structure. His formulaic arrangement of names in the Let verses of the poem deflates the individual “significance” — a term that also suggests the ability to signify — of the hundreds of names found in the verses. Moreover, the most biographical of the For verses (B.1-156) are composed as responses to verbal cues in the corresponding Let verses, not as independent or parallel lines. Collectively, however, all these names assert the authority of God as divine maker at the same time as they affirm the power of the poem’s maker to “organize” them — that is, to make them appear as a unified whole. Smart’s problem in composing Jubilate Agno is that, although he wants to construct the poem as an open-ended meditation that reflects something of the variety of a universe formed by a benevolent creator, he must also English Stu d ie s in C a n a d a , 2 1, 4, December 1995 establish a suitable framework for that meditation. This problem is related to his spiritual problem of wanting to reveal God as the ultimate authority of all things, including Jubilate Agno itself, while at the same time wanting to reveal his own authority as maker of the poem. The tension between the free play of the verbal signihers that comprise the text of the poem and the formulaic arrangement of those signihers parallels the tension between the free play of the literary artist and the rational ordering of the imagination within the conventions of literary art. Smart tries to solve these problems by representing himself in various roles within the text of the poem: in Jubilate Agno, Smart acts as author, editor, and reader ah in one. The multiple roles Smart plays in the poem allow him to enact his own representation within it and simultaneously to comment on that representa tion. For Smart, the assumption of various representations within a single text was nothing new: in the various magazines he edited for his publisher and father-in-law, John Newbery, he had been rehearsing some version of the system of representation he employs in Jubilate Agno. At the same time, Jubilate Agno also demonstrates that authorial representation is only acceptable if it is subsumed within a framework that asserts the ultimate authority of God. Most of Smart’s major projects after 1760 also attempt to work within a divine or ecclesiastical framework.2 Jubilate Agno therefore stands as a bridge between what has often been regarded as dichotomous halves of Smart’s career: his work as a writer and editor of miscellanies and...