SOURCE: '"Blest Light': Christopher Smart's Myth of David," in The David Myth in Western Literature, edited by Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik, Purdue University Press, 1980, pp. 120-33.

In the following essay, Dillingham analyzes the importance of the works of King David and Horace as models for Smart's poetry.

Christopher Smart's career is generally perceived as a paradigm of professional disorder, a kind of poetic junk shop littered with odd bits of undergraduate humor, Miltonic fustian, Grub Street hackwork, and only occasionally enriched with the poetic jewels in the creation of which Smart, as Robert Browning observed, "pierced the screen / 'Twixt thing and word, lit language straight from soul" [Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day, 1887]. The disorder of Smart's life is undeniable and can be seen by all in any of several more or less sympathetic biographies, as well as permanently impressed in the minds...